I have migrated this blog/newsletter over to Beehiiv. The new web address is davekarpf.beehiiv.com.

I have already ported over the subscriber list. Everyone should have received an email from the new Beehiiv account, making a parallel announcement. Please check your inbox (and your spam filter, if you don’t see anything) to confirm you are still on the list.

Nothing else will be changing. You can expect the same sort of posts, on the same range of topics, at around the same cadence. I’m just moving over to Beehiiv because, as I mentioned last week, the trajectory of Substack-the-company doesn’t line up with the sort of writing I want to do anymore.

Thanks for reading,

-Dave

Unsurprisingly, I hate it. This is noxious for society and particularly toxic for writers. Basketball blogger Tom Ziller articulated the problem well in his newsletter this morning:

How could deep integration of Polymarket into a content platform cause problems? Well, you can bet on NBA MVP futures on Polymarket. (Sorry, you can “buy event contracts on who will win MVP.”) Now it’s seamless to write a Substack post on why Marvin Bagley III should win MVP, embed a Polymarket ticker showing the odds (sorry, the “price of that event contract”) go up or down and put your readers one click away from betting on that (sorry, “buying event contracts on that”).

Substack writers, even the biggest ones covering the NBA, aren’t going to tilt an MVP race. But what about an event like “will Giannis get traded?” You have legitimate newsbreakers on Substack and other platforms – not just the big names we all know, but team beat writers, too. There’s a slippery slope from all this integration with shady quasi-gambling to these folks becoming straight-up touts. Is that what anyone wants?

And set aside the NBA and sports. These platforms let you put money on whether countries will be bombed or invaded! What the hell? Is that what anyone wants?

All of this is wrapped up in that fact that insiders are likely to be the only people with actual chances of making money playing the prediction markets. (We still haven’t seen a good explanation as to why someone made a killing buying up event contracts on the eve of Nicolas Maduro’s capture.) So Substack writers will potentially be selling out their own readers to participate in a tilted game they are likely to lose ... just like the writers and podcasters pitching tilted parlays at their readers and listeners already are.

Is that what anyone wants?

The future of Substack is going to tilt toward writers with large audiences running completely unregulated pump-and-dump schemes through prediction markets. Buy low, tell your readers why X outcome is undervalued, sell high, pocket the difference. Not all Substack writers will make use of the Polymarket widget. But if you want the company to algorithmically promote your content, maybe you should try out this hot new gambling trend.

It is wildly awkward to treat this as a breaking point. A lot of writers I deeply respect have left the platform because it subsidizes and amplifies white nationalists. I stuck around through all that, and now draw the line at… Polymarket? (C’mon Dave. Really?!?)

Nonetheless… yeah, I’m out. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to figure out an alternate newsletter host and migrate to them. I suspect none you will mind.

FWIW, I see this less as a bridge-too-far than as a long overdue catalyst. I was bound to move on from Substack eventually, and this seems like an opportune time. A few reasons why:

(1) I fully expect Substack to enshittify. The platform’s business model doesn’t add up. It is a company with a $1.1 billion valuation, whose primary revenue stream is taking a 10% cut from paid newsletter subscriptions. The largest newsletters can seamlessly decamp to competitors that charge a flat monthly fee (Ghost, Beehiiv, Buttondown, Patreon).

That means, in practice, that the company’s business model is keep the VC investors impressed, so they continue to pump in fresh liquidity. This is one reason why the Substack-Polymarket partnership makes so much sense. The VCs that like Substack also like prediction markets. Who cares if it degrades journalism, or further promotes gambling addiction, or (just in general) does nothing to improve the core newsletter product? The future of Substack is catering to whatever the folks at Andreessen Horowitz are into right now. It’s going to become an escalating pile of gimmicks and unsavory partnerships, all aimed at catering to the tastes of people who I criticize.

Back in 2023, when I left Twitter for good, I wrote a post titled “Does Anyone Think Twitter Gets Better from Here?” I feel like the same vibe is in play at Substack now. I’m not predicting the imminent collapse of the platform or anything. Plenty of writers I enjoy are going to keep using the product — they just won’t use the polymarket widget, in the same way they don’t link to the white nationalists, etc. But at some point, I figure we’re all gonna realize this place is getting worse and won’t get better.

(2) The vibes are bad, and they won’t get any better. This has been true for a long time. Back in December 2023, when news of the Substack-nazi problem broke, I wrote a piece titled “On Substack Nazis, laissez-faire tech regulation, and mouse-poop-in-cereal-boxes.” The main point was that I don’t expect a platform like Substack to have zero white nationalists, but it ought to endeavor to have only trace amounts of white nationlists — few enough that you wouldn’t notice.

Substack, instead, has been aggressively everything-goes when it comes to promoting, monetizing, and amplifying some of the worst people on the internet. This relates back to point 1: Andreessen Horowitz really digs the Dark Enlightenment and Curtis Yarvin and all the other edgelord-racists. Substack is going to fumble every crisis comms situation, because it is trying to stay on the right side of the billionaire group chats.

The downstream effect is that it has become increasingly embarrassing to mention the company that hosts my newsletter/blog-with-a-distribution-list. Any time Substack is in the news, it is bad news. Any time I mention having a Substack, I feel the need to say “I know, I know, I’m sorry.” It’s a slow-drip bummer of a situation. Each time Substack-central makes an announcement, I cringe and stare longingly at the exists.

If Substack had been able to settle on an equilibrium point where it’s just infrastructure, and no one notices which infrastructure you are using, then I would have stuck it out here. But that hasn’t happened, and it isn’t going to happen.

(3) I have more time available now than I’m going to have anytime soon. The two main reasons why I’ve stuck around for the past couple years are (a) it’s a chore and (b) I’m constantly tired and overworked. (Parenting is hard, y’all!) Both of those sticking points remain true right now. 2026 has been cognitively taxing from everyone.

But I’m handing in the last round of book edits next week, and then I’ll spend the rest of 2026 doing fun side projects while I wait for the book’s January 2027 publication date. Realistically, I am never going to be less tired and overworked than I am right now.

I don’t expect the Polymarket news to prompt a wave of writers leaving for greener pastures, and I’m certainly not going to judge any writers who stick around (particularly the unmonetized writers — see below). This is the right time for me to make the move. My guess is many others will find their own right times to do the same.

(4) The downsides of moving.

-Substack juices subscriber growth through its discovery feature. I get a tiny dopamine hit from seeing the number go up. I will have to get funnier or more insightful to keep that dopamine hit coming, or else just write for the pleasure of writing.

-Sticker shock. Substack charges me $0/month to operate this free newsletter. Once I migrate to Beehiiv or Ghost, I’m going to be paying $140/month. That means I’m going to have to turn on the monetization settings. If 28 of my readers decide to chip in $5/month, then I’m golden. If zero of my readers decide to donate $5/month, then this is going to quickly feel like a very expensive blogging habit.

-Relatedly, this means I’ll have to start occasionally asking readers to fund my blogging habit. I’m going to hate that so much. There is nothing less-pleasurable about writing than the asking-for-money part.

(5) So what’s the plan from here?

I’ll be sorting this all out in early March. (I have a March 1st book deadline. I’m going to put off migration headaches until I’ve finished fixing all the footnotes.) You might see another blog post or two here in the meantime.

I have heard equally good things about Ghost, Beehiiv, and Buttondown. Not sure which platform I’ll settle on. But I’m quite sure that won’t matter for you, the reader. At some point in March, I’ll export my reader list to another site. The URL will change. You’ll keep getting weekly emails from me, with slightly different formatting. And from there, I’ll just keep on writing while the world burns.

Thanks for reading, folks. I’ve enjoyed writing here, and imagine I’ll enjoy it a bit more at the next place.

Best,

-DK

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I’ve been thinking recently about an old Neal Stephenson essay, In the Beginning… Was the Command Line. The essay was published in book-length format in 1999, at a time when Linux felt like the future. The book is about operating systems, but it’s also about much more than that. Fundamentally, it’s about the sort of relationship people have with their computers.

There’s this great, overarching metaphor that sticks with you — that Microsoft Windows is like a station wagon, and Apple’s OS is like a luxury sedan, while Linux is like a free tank. Linux is the much better, much cheaper alternative. People find it intimidating, because they don’t know how to repair a tank. But it isn’t like they know how to repair a station wagon or a sedan either!

I first read the book in the late ‘00s, and it left me thinking “well, I’m convinced! I should probably learn Linux. Eventually, everyone is going to be using the much cheaper/much better operating system. And then, of course, I did no such thing. Learning to code has always seemed like a chore to me. I never developed the taste for it. And so I just never put in the effort, forever satisfied with Apple’s expensive luxury sedan model. The type of relationship that Linux-users have to their computers is not the sort of relationship I wish to have.

I read the book again last year. The argument is still compelling. But the interesting bit, with hindsight, is that the seemingly inevitable future-of-mass-computing, as rendered by Neal Stephenson never came to pass.

Linux (and open source software more generally) was a revolution. But it was only a revolution within the boundaries of the computer industry. Much of the web runs on open source. The core of Apple’s operating system runs on open source too. You interact with open source software throughout your day. But (if you’re a normie like me) your relationship to open source software is no different than your relationship to proprietary software.

So the Linux revolution didn’t fail, but it also didn’t follow the expected path. The early adopters in 1999 were all, by definition, techies. They saw the liberatory potential of this new software system and imagined it would transform the public, altering how people en masse engaged with software. But the public remained stubbornly un-transformed. Linux empowers the computer user, but a great many users simply were not interested in that sort of empowerment.

This has all been on my mind recently because of Claude Code and the brash confidence I am hearing from some corners of the internet about the shape of the AI revolution.

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I haven’t tried out Claude Code yet. I’ve been meaning to. I just can’t think of anything that is worth the hassle. I read Casey Newton’s piece on the subject, where he had Claude Code build him a website. I watched the Hard Fork video where he walked Kevin Roose through the process too. It’s interesting, and I think it’s worth taking seriously.

But the thing is, I don’t need a new website. I don’t need a digital assistant to prep my course lectures or keep track of my expenses. Maybe that makes me an outlier, but I kind of doubt it? My daily routines are extremely boring-middle-aged-dad-coded.

Take a look at this Super Bowl ad, from Base44. It isn’t the best AI ad of this year’s crop (that would be Anthropic, being so deliciously petty). It wasn’t the worst (that would be Svedka. What? Why?). But it’s probably the most in sync with the current mood among AI boosters.

It’s a simple ad. An office worker vibecodes an app. Her colleagues are incredulous. (She can’t do that! She doesn’t know how to code!) But ah hah, now with Base44’s AI, she can. So then all the other office workers start vibecoding their own apps.

I brought this up with my students on Monday. Do any of them have ideas for apps they would like to vibecode? At first, no one raised their hand. Then one student volunteered that she liked the idea of creating an app that could visualize and organize her closet. She referenced a scene from the 1995 movie Clueless.1 But the student then immediately backtracked. She didn’t want to vibecode the Clueless closet-organizer app. She just wishes she could download something like that. The type of relationship that those imaginary office-workers had to software was not something that I or my students wish to have.

This doesn’t render Claude Code or agentic coding agents just a flash in the pan. As I mentioned last month, I think it’s worth operating from the premise that we are seeing a step-change in what these tools can be used for. But it does mean we should keep in mind that the experience of early adopters — the people who are most enthused by coding agents — is probably dissimilar to the normies. This thing can be revolutionary for coders and entrepreneurs, while still being nothing like the social revolution they imagine is in the offing. It feels very much like Neal Stephenson overestimating the social contagion of the Linux revolution circa 1999. It can be a lightning bolt within one sector of the economy, but still limited to people with a very specific set of tastes and preferences.

Incidentally, I just finished reading Clive Thompson’s 2019 book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. It’s quite a good book, and well worth checking out. The final chapter is a real eyebrow-raiser at this juncture. The chapter — “Blue Collar Coding” — is about how the demand for skilled coders is so great, and the market for coding jobs is so promising, that we are heading for a future where more and more people make their careers out of learning to code.

That was the future, circa 2019. (Or, at least, it was a claim that had the aura of futurity to it.) Major resource investments were made, for YEARS, premised upon the belief that the future would both demand and reward people with a coder’s sensibilities and skills. The developments in agentic coding are indeed a radical challenge to the people and programs who were tied up in those claims for the past decade or so. This is a big deal for them. But there is a layer of insulation between those circles and mass society.

Linux didn’t conquer the world, because Linux demanded a relationship to software that most people didn’t want to have. I continue to pay arguably-too-much for my Macbook because I want to have a certain type of relationship to computing. Coding is not something I want to do. Linux did partially did conquer the software world, though. And Claude Code might conquer the software world as well. But the trajectory is probably going to abruptly slow down, because its creators don’t recognize the gap.

The promise of vibecoding is that now you can code without learning to code. And I suspect a meaningful part of what comes next is that the people who did not want to have a coder’s relationship with computing simply won’t get into vibecoding.

Think of Claude Code as a tool for empowerment. But many people aren’t asking for empowerment, at least within the boundaries of their relationship to a computer. What they want instead is convenience.

(And, of course, all this is happening against the backdrop of eye-watering expenditures. Agentic coding needs to be a revolution for the masses, or else the finances don’t work out. But that’s a story for another day.)

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It’s being reported that over $1 billion was wagered on Kalshi this Sunday. That included over $100 million in bets on what Bad Bunny’s first song would be. This is bad, and I think we all know its bad, and everyone ought to say so goddammit. To a first approximation, $500,000,000 was lost on Kalshi this Sunday. Much of that surely came from people who would have been better off using that money for other things. $500,000,000 was also won on Kalshi this Sunday. For every winner, there is an equal and opposite loser (minus Kalshi’s fee).

…Oh and also, Kalshi turned around and paid some of its fees to Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is now promoting the gambling site to all of his fans. (Giannis is bad now. We are done with Giannis.)

Kalshi wants to create a world where “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” I wish we still lived in a society where someone in a position of authority would ask the obvious follow-up question: “Are you kidding me? Why?”

Set aside how this leads to truly impossible levels of insider trading and corruption. (We can come back to that.) Just think for a moment about how it degrades every facet of society.

Kalshi is a negative-sum game. For every winner, there is an equal and opposite loser, minus the fee that Kalshi extracts. No additional value is created.1 When the gambling economy becomes larger than the actual economy, then actual economic and social activity just becomes something to gamble upon. We all know how that story plays out, don’t we? Desperate people end up taking desperate measures, while the gambling sites maintain plausible deniability and leave everyone else to handle the fallout.

Here’s what I believe: gambling ought to be legal. But it ought to be legal in the same way that cigarettes are legal. It should be heavily regulated, difficult to access, with zero advertising and a ton of social stigma.

(Josh Gondelman phrased it well in his newsletter yesterday: “Gambling should be something you have to hide from your wife and children. It should not be an activity that Kevin Hart begs you to do at every commercial break.”)

I wrote about this two years ago (“Old Gambler Yells at Clouds”). Circumstances have gotten worse, so allow me to repeat myself.

I was a semi-professional poker player in my twenties. It’s still a hobby, and I haven’t lost my touch. Unless you, dear reader, are a professional, you probably don’t want to sit down at the table with me.

Poker is a game of skill, with a significant element of chance. It isn’t pure gambling. But neither are sports betting or prediction markets. Some people are better at sports betting, others are worse. Over time, the money will flow to the sharps and away from the recreational players.

I remember, in my 20s, I played in a game against this one guy who was a big loser. Anytime he was in the game, the game was good. He was a nice guy. Owned a string of pizza parlors. He was going through a divorce. (Amicable, it seemed.) Poker was how he blew off steam. He didn’t mind paying to chase an inside straight draw,. This was his entertainment budget, and he could afford to lose it. It wasn’t healthy for him. But that wasn’t my problem. He was going to lose that money whether I was at the table or not.

I never felt guilty playing in those games because there was so much social friction between guys like him and the poker table. The game wasn’t advertised anywhere. You had to hear about it from someone. You showed up at a nondescript doorway, rang the buzzer, and waited for them to recognize you before being let in. And that meant everyone knew what they were getting themselves into. Caveat Emptor, and all that jazz.

The problem with sports betting and prediction markets isn’t that gambling has been made legal. It’s that it has been made entirely too accessible. Kalshi has Giannis advertising its product. DraftKings has Lebron. CNN is partnering with Kalshi as well. Everything everywhere has been turned into an advertisement for gambling sites. It has never been easier to risk money you can’t afford to lose. It should be hard to risk that money.

We, as a society, ought to be in the habit of stigmatizing and regulating social vices. This seems so glaringly obvious that I wonder sometimes why it even needs to be said.

That doesn’t mean we outlaw all gambling. But it means we really ought to start treating gambling and prediction markets like cigarettes. They are social vices — harmful for the individual, with collective costs that we all bear.

We dealt with cigarettes by (1) adding obnoxious warning labels, (2) outlawing advertising — particularly advertisements that target young people, and (3) banning them from certain locales, and (4) taxing the hell out of them.

Cigarettes are legal, but at least every single smoker had to endure an appropriate amount of social friction to engage in their preferred vice.

The Trump administration isn’t going to handle any of this, because ellohell of course they aren’t. But holy hell some Democratic Presidential candidate ought to make this one of their centerpiece campaign issues. There is nothing more traditionally conservative than declaring “this new vice is bad, and we ought to go back to the way things were in the olden days.” Here we have an issue where progressives are equally outraged, and inattentive normies recognize “yeah there’s gambling in everything now and it seems pretty fucked up.”

In the meantime, while we’re waiting to install a government that actually cares about democratic governance, we should at least engage in some old-fashioned social shaming.

Sports-bettors are losers. Prediction markets are for chumps. If your reaction to Bad Bunny’s halftime performance was “did I win money on it,” then that’s bad and you ought to feel bad about it.

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Cryptocurrencies are crashing right now. You love to see it. A few months ago, the price of bitcoin was close to $125,000. Last night it hit a low of $60,000. It has bounced back to around $70,000 now. The chart below is just the past month. It’s probably too early to declare another “crypto winter” (don’t jinx this, folks!), but it’s clearly more than just a blip.

Paul Kedrosky flagged yesterday afternoon that the broader crypto ecosystem has shed $2 trillion.

That’s enough nominal value for things to get interesting (derogatory). Ponzi schemes and other assorted scams tend to do fine when times are flush. It’s only when people start calling in loans that they get exposed, producing a contagion effect on other shady counterparties.

But it also raises a specific, very basic point: when we say $2 trillion was lost from the crypto ecosystem, we should also be clear about where it went. It went nowhere. That money was never real to begin with.

Consider this toy example: you create a new cryptocurrency. Call it Futurecoin. You mint 1,000,000,001 futurecoin tokens. You sell one futurecoin token to a friend for one dollar. Maybe they buy it because they’re in on the grift, or maybe they buy it because you sold them on a dazzling vision where futurecoin replaces the dollar, or maybe they buy it because they think its’s funny.

The market has now priced futurecoin at a dollar, so the market cap of Futurecoin is nominally over $1 billion. That’s obviously hollow, since if you tried to find buyers for the other billion tokens, the price would collapse to zero. But market cap is just PRICE x SHARES.

Now imagine that you went to a bank and said “hey, can I have a $50 million loan? I’m good for it. I have $1 billion in futurecoin that I can offer as collateral.” Hopefully the banker would say "hey that’s very funny. I am grinning while I kick you out of this establishment.” But it’s also entirely possible that some banker would say “let me run some risk calculations on the likelihood futurecoin’s collapse, so I can appropriately price the thing. Ooh, you’re saying this coin is the future? I like these odds. Sure, here’s your loan.” Now your fake currency is hooked into the real financial system. And that’s, y’know, bad.

We have rules against this sort of thing. But we don’t really enforce them much anymore, because (to oversimplify it just a bit) the various futurecoin companies spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to influence the 2024 election, and they have hired very expensive lawyers too, so now we have a legislative branch that wants to make nice with them and an executive branch that has basically bought into the grift.

If you read Molly White or Matt Levine then you know all of this already. It’s pretty foundational stuff. But I think it bears repeating at a moment like this.

Cryptocurrencies haven’t lost $2 trillion in actual dollars. Actual money wasn’t taken out of crypto and spent on something else. What happened is that the marginal price of various cryptocurrencies has gone down. When the going rate for Bitcoin was $120,000, all the bitcoin holders could pretend they had $120,000. And they could use that bitcoin as collateral without bothering to sell it. Which was important, because if they all sold it, the price would collapse and they would find out that it wasn’t actually worth nearly that much.

When the price of Bitcoin drops to $60,000, the market cap is cut in half. But even that is fake, because Bitcoin is a speculative asset with no fundamental value. It is only ever worth what the next person is willing to buy it for (or whatever discount banks apply to it as collateral).

My hunch is that the current crypto crash is tied to the AI bubble. The price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has been backstopped by a lot of very rich tech and finance people, who keep the whole system afloat by providing liquidity when it falls below a predetermined threshold. Many of those people have now diverted their investments toward AI companies and their associated phenomenal capital expenditures. So there may simply be fewer buyers-of-last-resort available to keep things from spiraling out of control.

Again, I’m not ready to declare a crypto winter just yet. The price of Bitcoin will go back up so long as someone with a lot of resources decides it is worth spending to reinflate the thing. But this is, at the very least, a phenomenon worth watching. When crypto prices fell in 2022, a few big scams were exposed, and that led to pretty massive contagion because everything was collateral for everything else. If prices stay low for a few more weeks, the cracks in the system might become impossible to ignore. And that’s when things get very interesting indeed.

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(Well, two things, I guess. The first being: fuck you, Jeff Bezos.)

Among those fired was Lizzie Johnson, currently on assignment in the middle of a warzone in Ukraine. They also shuttered the sports desk, which seems noteworthy because in the olden days, news outlets subsidized their international coverage (costly, lower readership, but high public value) with the sports section and the funny pages (cheaper, high readership).

So the Post won’t be reporting on international news, and it won’t be reporting on local sports. They also took a hatchet to their climate and tech reporting teams. The Opinion and Editorial sections are only for readers who like the taste of boot. It’s barely a shell of the paper that Bezos acquired in 2013. What a goddamn farce.

The thing I keep circling back to is how we arrived at this point. Jeff Bezos has owned the Washington Post since 2013. For almost a decade, he was about as good of a steward as you could hope for. He hired Marty Baron and left the journalists to be in charge of the actual journalism. When the paper lost money, he wrote a check.

There was a time when this looked like a flawed-but-workable model for the future of news. Journalism is a public good. Public goods require some form of subsidy — the marketplace, alone, will by definition leave them underprovided. The best form of subsidy is pretty clearly public funding (think BBC, PBS, NPR). But significant public funding in the United States hasn’t been on the table given the political dynamics of the past 20+ years. So the largesse of otherwise-disinterested billionaires seemed like a viable backup plan.

It’s a model that treats news outlets like sports franchises. Some billionaires buy a football team, others buy a newspaper. In both cases, the billionaire is enhancing their status by owning something that is scarce and beloved by a large public. And in both cases, the system functions best when the rich guy doesn’t meddle in the actual running of the thing.

This isn’t, in and of itself, great. It’s conspicuous consumption for the uber-wealthy. But it sure beats handing things over to private equity.

A funding system like this has a single point of failure: the owner might turn out to be a moral cretin. He might decide to demolish the news to further his own interests.

Jeff Bezos, it turns out, is a moral cretin.

Make no mistake: the Post didn’t just fire 300 (out of 800) journalists because it was losing too much money. As Peter Baker points out, Bezos’s net worth has increased $55.4 billion since 2024 alone.

No, the thing that has changed is that Jeff Bezos has developed a political agenda. He is on Team Billionaire. Team Billionaire thinks that billionaires are brilliant, wise, and omnicompetent. It can’t stomach leaving journalists in charge of the journalism, because surely the billionaire owner has better instincts and deeper insights. Team Billionaire thinks the public needs to stay in line and respect their betters. Team Billionaire thinks the government should stay on the sidelines (at least until its bailout time, that is).

Team Billionaire isn’t quite the same as Team Trump, but the two have made peace and found common cause with each other. Jeff Bezos knows that, if the Washington Post publishes the wrong story about the wrong person, it could spell trouble for Blue Origin or Amazon. Being a hands-off media mogul was fine when it didn’t cause any trouble. But under authoritarianism, it can be such a headache. Better to just ether the whole thing and curry favor with the regime.

I can’t help but draw parallels to what’s happening at CBS right now. It feels like Bari Weiss and (WaPo publisher/general scumbucket) Will Lewis are engaged in some elaborate Randolph-and-Mortimer bet, to see who can completely shred a revered news institution first.1

The other parallel that comes to mind is political philanthropy. One of my longstanding observations about the difference between the left and the right is that donations from progressive billionaires are a form of charity, while donations from conservative billionaires are effectively a business expense. When the Koch Brothers set up a whole network of conservative groups to argue for tax cuts and deregulation, they’re outsourcing the work of lobbying for their own private interests. There will always be more billionaire-cash available for advancing-the-narrow-interests-of-billionaires than there will be for supporting-civil-society-and-the-public-good.

So the dream of supporting journalism through billionaire philanthropy is basically dead now. Any system built on the assumption that billionaires will not reveal themselves to be moral cretins is destined, eventually, to fail.

In the near-term, we’ll have as much serious journalism as the market will provide. (Hey. Please subscribe to 404 Media and WIRED and Defector.) And that won’t be nearly as much journalism as a healthy society requires.

In the longer term, we aren’t going to fix our journalism until we also fix our wealth inequality problem. Because even when the owners are well-behaved, we can’t count on them staying that way for long.

So let me conclude by returning to where I started: fuck you, Jeff Bezos. Fuck you very much.

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A line from Ethan Mollick’s most recent newsletter (“Claude Code and What Comes Next”) caught my eye. Mollick tries out Claude Code and sees a step-change in AI capabilities:

I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it. i shouldn’t have to do anything at all except run some program you give me once. it shouldn’t require any coding knowledge on my part, so make sure everything works well.” The AI asked me three multiple choice questions and decided that I should be selling sets of 500 prompts for professional users for $39. Without any further input, it then worked independently… FOR AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES creating hundreds of code files and prompts. And then it gave me a single file to run that created and deployed a working website (filled with very sketchy fake marketing claims) that sold the promised 500 prompt set. You can actually see the site it launched here, though I removed the sales link, which did actually work and would have collected money. I strongly suspect that if I ignored my conscience and actually sold these prompt packs, I would make the promised $1,000.

Mollick isn’t the only one who’s impressed. It’s being described as a “general-purpose AI agent.” Casey Newton has declared himself a “Claude Code believer.” Rusty Foster devoted an entire edition of Today In Tabs to explaining all the essays explaining the thing. Andy Hall thinks it will revolutionize political science.

I haven’t tried out Claude Code yet. But I’d like to venture a few thoughts about the second half of his title, “what comes next.” Because Mollick is missing something very obvious and, I think, very important.

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As a thought experiment, let’s assume that Mollick is right about Claude Code’s capabilities.

Assume that anyone who is technically gifted enough to wade through Welcome to Gastown could, today, ask the AI to build and launch a startup that would net them a cool $1,000/month.

How long would you expect that to last? What actually comes next?

Here’s my prediction: Mollick’s product cannot make him $1,000/month for very long, because it is not a unique product and there are no barriers to everyone else doing the same thing. That first $1,000 is entirely a novelty effect. It will not and cannot last, because we will have infinite sellers and extremely finite buyers.

If the past 20 years of internet history any guide at all, here’s what happens next:

1. Today: A few of Mollick’s less-scrupulous readers ask the AI to generate passive income by launching businesses, each of which are capable of generating $1,000/month.

2. Month 1: they make $1,000 per site. They start posting their W’s on LinkedIn and X.com and Instagram and TikTok, becoming instant influencer-celebrities. The New York Times and every other mainstream news outlet rushes to cover the trend.

3. Month 2: millions of these sites launch. All of the Claude Code instances are clustering around the same set of indistinguishable business ideas. The Internet is awash in AI-generated, low-quality product offerings. Mollick’s own prompt pack business stops generating $1,000/month, because scammers and spammers and low-effort hustlebros are all asking their own instances of Claude Code for the same brilliant money-making ideas. The market is all sellers/no buyers.

4. Month 3: Internet culture essayists at The Verge and WIRED write about how AI keeps making the internet shittier for everyday people. AI evangelists howl in response about how these culture writers just don’t get it.

5. Month 4: Anthropic and Google both announce new subscription-tier agents that help users weed through all the cruddy, identical crap to find unique/real offerings.

6. Month 5 and beyond: Another turning of the hype cycle, as the models get better but their institution-level impacts become more corrosive.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Henry Farrell makes a similar-but-more-nuanced point in his newsletter today: AI is great for scientists. Perhaps it’s not so great for science.

AI use seems to be really good for the careers of individual scientists. Scientists who use it are able to write a lot more papers, with less help from other human researchers. Those papers are more likely to be cited by others. Their authors are on average promoted more quickly. All these relationships are associational rather than causal, but they are both visible and important at scale.

The problem is that what is good for scientists may not be good for science as a whole. Papers that use AI are more likely to succeed, but apparently less likely to stretch boundaries. Evans and his co-authors deploy another bespoke AI model to measure how AI-aided papers shape knowledge production. They find that AI-enabled research tends to shrink scientific inquiry to a smaller set of more topical questions. Furthermore, the linkages between papers suggest that there is less vibrant horizontal exchange associated with AI.

He links to a recent essay by Seva Gunitsky that I also recommend, The Academic Age of AI Slop Is Upon Us.

The coming AI-generated papers may be unoriginal but they aren’t lifeless(…). They’re technically proficient. They follow the form. They’re adequate. They’re easy to do and require little creativity, but also constitute the kind of legitimate incremental work that Thomas Kuhn called “normal science”.

Call it Slop-Plus? Premium Slop? Maybe that’s too harsh. The German term for Kuhn’s normal science is Normalwissenschaft, so maybe Automatenwissenschaft?

Whatever we call it, what does its emergence mean for academia?

(…) The biggest effect is that peer review now becomes more about discernment or taste. If anyone can produce a competent empirical paper on any topic, the bottleneck moves to identifying which questions are important to ask in the first place. (…) the question for reviewers and editors [becomes'] less “is this right?” and more “why does this matter?”

Henry also writes about the inevitable genre-fication of scientific research. There are specific empirical puzzles and research methods that will fit LLM capabilities quite smoothly. The discipline will be awash in those, on par with Mollick’s $1,000/month startups (but moving more glacially, since academia has a built-in glacial pace). The types of research that don’t fit LLMs will became even more rare.

The effect on science is akin to the parable of the drunken search. We will study those things that Claude Code makes it remarkably easy to study. The first-movers will be rewarded with jobs and promotions and accolades. A wave of second-movers will rush to copy them, receiving far fewer professional gains. The discipline will move further away from its purported object of study. And then, a decade or so later, there will be a wave of “discipline-in-crisis” panels, bemoaning how we got into this terrible mess.

I can see this all happening. I hate it. Science — and the social sciences, in particular — will get worse, while the capabilities of a few distinct technologies improve. The people who most love these technologies will insist that the future is bright, and they’llspeculate on the wonderful possibilities that have just been unleashed, and they’ll never once notice the obvious parallels between today’s digital future and digital futures’ past.

Henry ends on a more hopeful note than I do. (Henry is, in general, a more hopeful person than I am. That is one of the many reasons why I recommend reading him. He writes:

To be clear, this is not an inevitable consequence of the technology. To steal another analogy from pop music, Autotune has likely, on average, made pop music more bland, but it has also been used in weird and interesting ways to expand the range of things that you can do. The Nature article employs a basic LLM to make the scientific enterprise visible at scale in ways that would have been inconceivable fifteen years ago. But it is going to be hard to get to a place where the technology is better suited to serve the interests of science, rather than those interests of scientists that point away from discovery.

The arc of history doesn’t bend in any given direction on its own. Here’s hoping, through collective, conscious effort, we build and reinforce the institutions that make these novel tools serve the interests of science and the common good.

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Five years ago was the insurrection. It was only a mile from my house. I watched it from my phone, with my children safe indoors and unaware.

My daughters still don’t know about the attack on the Capitol. They are at an age where it would be… difficult to explain, provoking far too many questions for which there are no satisfying answers. They know instead that Donald Trump is the President, and that we do not like him very much, and that we wish the other candidate would have won. My youngest asked recently how much longer he would be President, and I told her “three more years” with a certainty that she did not notice I did not feel.

I find myself thinking today about an old essay I wrote. It was titled “Afflicting the Comfortable.” It appeared in an edited volume on the Media and January 6th. Academic writing proceeds at a glacial pace. I drafted the essay in 2022, as a contribution to a conference held on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. I edited it in 2023, and the book was published in March 2024. As with much of my writing, the essay glances both forward and backward. It was, functionally, a warning left unheeded.

Here are the bits that matter (mostly from the introduction, with a bit of the conclusion):

There have to be consequences.

If we are to stave off the next insurrection, it is essential that the people who planned the last one face social sanctions. If January 6, 2021, becomes a badge of honor or a pathway to profit and power, then we seal the collective fate of the nation.

We can approach the problem of preventing the next insurrection from three main angles. We can focus on the mass public—the Republican Party-in-Electorate, a majority of whom now tells pollsters that they believe Trump won the 2020 election despite all evidence to the contrary. We can focus on the communication channels—the social media and partisan media that, through a mix of algorithmic and analytics-based optimization, disseminate and amplify these lies because they prove to be good for business even if they are bad for democracy. Or we can focus on the media and political elites—the small set of powerful actors who crafted the Big Lie, sought advantage through it, and are setting plans in motion for next time.

All three angles deserve attention. But it appears to me that they are often prioritized in the wrong order.

It is easiest to bemoan public misinformation and the loss of social trust and cohesion at the mass scale—to ask searching questions about why the Republican electorate has lost faith in our political institutions and to earnestly pursue efforts to rebuild that wellspring of bygone institutional trust. There has never been a social problem that “civic education” could not be rendered a solution to.

It is nearly as easy, in recent years, to blame the social media platforms. Facebook and Google spent the previous decade displacing mainstream media organizations as the gatekeeper of newsworthiness and public information/disinformation. They did so while absorbing mainstream media’s advertising revenues, hastening the decline in local journalism. The social platforms have been lousy gatekeepers, far more likely to issue belated apologies than timely corrections. And yet, precisely because of the well-earned animosity between legacy journalism and the digital platforms, there has been a rush to place the lion’s share of the blame at the new gatekeepers’ feet. (Could Facebook have done a better job of tamping down on the Big Lie in the months leading up to the insurrection? Yes. Was Facebook responsible for the insurrection? No. It was a valuable tool that ought to have rendered itself less valuable.)

The partisan elites, meanwhile, behave with an audacity that suggests they have evaluated their situation and determined they have nothing to fear and everything to gain from their association with the insurrection. The Trump-supporting masses who sacked the Capitol face jail time. The Trump lieutenants who incited the attack are invited on The Masked Singer. The members of Congress who participated in the plot to overturn the election faced a brief reprisal from corporate donors announcing they would no longer donate to insurrectionists’ reelection efforts. Those announcements lasted less than six months before the donations quietly rolled back in. At the time of this writing, it seems likely that Republican elites who supported, funded, or even participated in the insurrection will win contested primaries and go on to serve as secretaries of state, members of the House of Representatives, and governors.

It is still unclear, at the time of this writing, whether and against whom the Justice Department will bring charges. It is eighteen months after January 6th, and it is still too early to draw conclusions about efforts at elite accountability. Unless there are legal repercussions, the work of elite accountability is going to require constant normative vigilance. There is still a real risk that the January 6 insurrection will be converted into a Trumpist Woodstock. If that occurs, then future insurrection attempts become a near-certainty.

(…)

Only the Republican Party can fix the Republican Party. The U.S. government is structured such that it can function only when both parties are at least nominally committed to the work of governance. And, particularly between the geographic biases of the Senate and the electoral comforts provided by gerrymandered House districts, there is little direct pressure that Democrats, mainstream media figures, policy experts, or public intellectuals can put on Republican politicians. If conservative media and political elites abandon all pretense of belief in the myth of the attentive public, and if furthermore they decide that they simply do not have any attachment to electoral democracy, then the only hope in the short or medium term is that they be replaced by other Republicans.

Even if Democrats win every close race against authoritarian extremists, American democracy simply cannot last if it hinges on Democrats winning every close race, every time. The normative pressure must come from institutional Republicans as well. It must be significant and sustained and ultimately successful.

Creating sustained normative penalties for those associated with the insurrection is one way to help these efforts. It signals that there are still lines that cannot be crossed (and that those lines are not merely “Republican-versus-Democrat”).

Pressuring, shaming, and shunning the political and media elites behind the “Stop the Steal” message is not the sole lever for preventing the next January 6th. But I believe it is essential that scrutiny, criticism, and pressure also be brought to bear on the elites. We must afflict the comfortable, so to speak.

Otherwise, predicting the next insurrection will be a matter of when, not if.

I cannot shake the sense, today, that we are living through the aftermath. We live in the inescapable shadow of January 6th. The insurrection ultimately succeeded, it was just delayed.

A year ago, on this blog, I wrote:

I suspect [the insurrection] is about to become a shibboleth of sorts. For at least the next two years, all judges who will be appointed to the federal bench will be expected to believe that the January 6th insurrectionists were patriots, peaceful except for the deep state infiltrators, trying to prevent an illegal power grab by the incoming Biden administration. All political appointees to federal agencies will have to hold the same beliefs. History will be rewritten to applaud their actions.

All that has effectively come to pass. There is, now, no law but Wilhoit’s Law. (“There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”) Media, tech, and business elites have determined that standing up to this administration is more trouble than it is worth. We have fewer resources to afflict the comfortable than ever before.

And so now we are governed by a Republican Party that toys with abandoning NATO and the entire post-WWII international order. (Maybe they’ll invade Greenland this year, just as a treat?) The federal government stations troops in Democratic cities and cuts off funding to Democratic states. RFK Jr. takes a wrecking ball to all public health measures, because he figures he knows better and who are any of us to contradict him. The rotting husk of Twitter now has a sexualized-child-photos-on-demand feature. Elon thinks its hilarious, so the government thinks that’s fine now I guess.

This will not last, but it is bound to get much worse before it gets better.

But I think it’s important, on the anniversary of January 6th, to recall that it also was not inevitable.

These times — the times we are living through today, the times filled with questions that have no satisfying answers — are the aftermath of our failure to hold power to account.

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I started writing The Future, Now and Then in 2022. I was in a bit of a rut, and decided to see if I could write my way out of it. The plan ever since has been to write something every week, and just see where that takes me.

This will be my 43rd and final post of the year. I took a few breaks to work on the book manuscript. Readership growth has tailed off a bit — I started the year around 9,000 subscribers, and will end just north of 11,000.

Conceptually, I’ve noticed that my writing here has gotten shorter and more take-shaped. In 2022 and 2023, I was mostly using this venue to work through some big ideas that were destined for the book. I would spend several days per week trying to wrestle those ideas into shape, and the essays were usually in the 2,500-3,500 word range. This year, while I refined those earlier ideas into book-shaped form, my blogging was more focused on immediate reactions to political or tech news. They tended to fall in the 1,000-1,500 word range, written in a single writing session. That’s… fine. But I’d like to get back to taking bigger swings in 2026.

Professionally, next year is going to be an odd one for me. The book will be in production all year, slated for an early 2027 release. I’ll be occupying that awkward liminal space where the work is done, and all that’s left is the waiting. This has been my main intellectual project since the summer of 2018. I’m going to need to find some interesting ways to distract myself.

I don’t quite know what shape those distractions will take. I have a few ideas. Stay tuned… it could get pretty fun.

And in the meantime, thanks to you all for reading.

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Here are the top five posts from The Future, Now and Then in 2025:

Number 5: The Three Types of Money In Silicon Valley

I’ve come to believe we can only understand Silicon Valley if we pay attention to the money. This post, from February, articulated the different types of money that contribute to the rise of Big Tech.

there are effectively three distinct types of money that have fueled Silicon Valley’s rise to dominance. There’s (1) government contracts, (2) direct product revenues, and (3) there’s investments and financial speculation.

(…)

I suspect that there is some mix of these three inputs that would be, well, healthy. If everything is government funded, we would not have nearly the rate of growth and technological development that competitive markets can spur. If everything was consumer products, we would have no internet access in rural areas, and nowhere close to enough basic research. A great many social goods are only achieved with government subsidy. And with no speculative finance — no IPOs, no VC funding rounds, the inputs for launching and scaling new companies and products would barely exist.

But I am quite confident that the current mix is deeply unhealthy. Speculative finance completely overshadows the other two. Companies are valued on the basis of their vibes — their aura of futurity. If the Keynesian beauty contest is just a sideshow, then it is really just a quirk.

Number 4: Every generation gets to recreate what environmentalism means

The New York Times wrote a big piece about the Sierra Club that, it seems to me, completely missed the mark. I wrote a piece highlighting the three main points that they got wrong.

the least-interesting-possible-version of this formula is oh no did the movement go too woke? Did the Sierra Club lose its focus?

If you know your movement history, the answer ought to be “which focus? Determined by whom?”

The people who drive the Sierra Club’s agenda are the people who show up and do the work. Every generation gets to decide what environmentalism ought to be. They respond and adapt to the moment, and do the best they can with what they have.

Number 3: Abundance is a book for an alternate timeline

I read and reviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance. In this review, I tried to grapple both with what the Abundance Agenda gets right and also what it gets wrong. But, for the most part, I noted how it seemed like a theory ill-suited for the moment we actually find ourselves living through.

ONE of the reasons it is hard to build an abundant future today is that we have too many legacy veto-points. Responsive government, by design, tends to move at a plodding pace. (As Dan Davies put it: “Of course things are slower and more difficult now – the reason that it’s more difficult to build the second million homes is that the first million homes get in the way!”)

But another, trickier reason is that if you reduce the veto-points that make it hard to build, and you don’t shift the incentives for Exxon and private equity, then what they will end up building will be godawful for the rest of us.

Number 2: Balaji Srinivasan wrote the worst book I have ever read.

I also read and reviewed Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State. I will never get over how bad this book is. I’m glad I read it, if only so I could more authoritatively say how ridiculous the whole thing is.

It’s essentially just Galt’s Gulch, plus blockchain.

If you want to know what the Tech Barons are attempting to replace democracy with, then it is important to take Srinivasan seriously.

But Balaji is not a serious person. The book is manifestly ridiculous. It is a blueprint drawn in crayon. Balaji’s ideas are stunningly undercooked, offered with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask him if he’s alright.

Number 1: It’s Giving Enron

And (drumroll, please…) my most-read piece from 2025 was “It’s Giving Enron,” which articulated the three main stories that were wrapped up in the dotcom crash, and had some pointed notes about what sort of AI bubble we are currently brewing.

There are three big stories that one can tell about the dotcom crash. The first is an overvalued-startup story (Think Pets.com). The second is a telecom story. The telecom industry flooded the market with cheap fiber, underestimating the costs and overestimating demand. And then there’s the Enron story. The Enron story is fundamentally about accounting fraud, but it was very complicated accounting fraud.

…The AI Bubble is giving Enron vibes.

That’s it for 2025. Thanks for reading. See you in 2026.

-DK

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I think 2026 is shaping up to be... better? Not good, mind you. But certainly less-bad. Here are my hunches about the year ahead:

• By late spring/early summer, Trump’s governing coalition will be consumed by infighting.

This won’t lead to anything dramatic like impeachment proceedings or invoking the 25th Amendment. But one of the critical differences between Trump’s first and second administrations is his ability to quell any intra-party opposition. Basically no one within the party network has been capable to stand up to him this time around.1 They have purged the ranks of the DOJ and the FBI and the military. The sole governing value that unites the Republican Party of 2025 is we agree with President Trump. The ability to maintain that party unity is one of his few relative strengths.

But, as Henry Farrell has argued, this sort of party unity is brittle. Absolute power can be a terrible weakness.

Here’s how it looks to me, right now: Trump’s approval rating currently hovers around 40%. The macroeconomic situation is dicey. Neither will improve in 2026. And, as we draw closer to election day, Republican leaders are going to panic and start blaming each other. Trump’s team will not deal well with dissension in the ranks, so things are likely to get out of hand.

That infighting will be a blessing, because the more time they spend fighting each other, the less bandwidth they have for attacking the rest of us.

This doesn’t mean we are out of the woods yet. Russ Vought and Stephen Miller are going to treat this year like a clearance sale on consolidating their fascist power grab. The Supreme Court majority will be even more brazen in trying to lock in election-proof permanent majority status for the Trump regime.

Still, assuming relatively normal elections in November, this could produce narrow Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

The internal fight among Democrats this year will be between the popularist “just say bland poll-tested shit and prepare to do nothing-at-all with your governing majority” wing and the twin left-populist/take-elite-corruption-seriously caucuses. The popularists will have a massive warchest supplied by wealthy donors, so their SuperPACs will dominate television advertising. But they’ll sound massively out-of-touch in ways that leave them falling flat everywhere else.

The popularist contingent will be represented by figures like David Shor and Matt Yglesias. They’ll sound a lot like Bret Stephens. I will spend mid-2026 engaged in far too many arguments with those guys.

• The AI bubble won’t burst quite yet, but it will become impossible to deny that we’re in the middle of a one.

I expect AI coding assistants will continue to make incremental improvements. I keep hearing that coders are blown away by the stuff. But that doesn’t mean generative AI is some magical general purpose technology. It might just be quite good for a few narrow sets of tasks.

AI slop is going to be everywhere in 2026, and everyone will fucking hate all of it. The cultural backlash will be in full swing next year. It has the makings of the biggest mass social rejection of a technology since Google Glass.

The AI finance bubble won’t quite burst, but only because the Trump administration (at the direction of David Sacks) props it up through a serious of absurd, obvious gimmicks. The government will supply public money to backstop huge Silicon Valley bets, recognizing that if the bubble were to pop before the November election, it would prompt a 2008-scale financial crisis. They’ll choose to prop up their VC buddies in the near-term rather than brace for the fallout.

But my hunch is that doesn’t save crypto. I think we slip into another crypto winter in 2026, as some of the big investors get scared about the AI bubble and reduce their exposure to other overinflated asset classes. There are still zero non-speculative, non-crime use cases for cryptocurrency. Once the big money get scared, all the valuations will go into freefall.

• Meanwhile, outside of electoral politics and AI…

-Billionaires buy 2-3 more major media outlets, consolidating their control of mass communication channels.

-Substack’s core newsletter product gets worse, as the company chases an endless series of growth hacks to keep their VC investors happy. Eventually they have another self-inflicted comms crisis that results in another wave of writers leaving for other platforms. I’ll be among them.

-We start a war with Venezuela or some other country Trump gets mad at.

-The mass mortality rates from preventable diseases ticks up, but it’s hard to conclusively prove the connection because the government doesn’t publish reliable data anymore.

-More carbon is pumped into the atmosphere than ever before, even though renewable energy keeps getting cheaper.

-A natural disaster strikes, and FEMA is woefully unprepared. The billionaire-owned major media outlets politely agree to barely cover it, and the algorithmic social media platforms suppress discussion as well.

-If there is a public health emergency, the government will just insist “no, there isn’t.”

I’ll end the predictions there, since this was meant to be an optimistic outlook and now I’m speculating on mass-death scenarios. (I am no fun at parties.)

Still, the bottom-line takeaway is that, if 2025 was defined by things falling apart faster than expected, my hunch is that 2026 will be defined by the bill coming due, and the Trump coalition fracturing as they are unable to pay it.

From there, the long road to recovery begins. It won’t be easy. But there is, I think, some light at the end of this tunnel.

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My standard approach is to create a reaction thread on Bluesky, and treat that as the first draft of a proper book review. Then I trim it down and turn it into a book review that resides on Substack.

I don’t see any point in turning the Nuzzi review into a substack post though. There have already been plenty of sharp-witted review, appropriately cataloguing the book’s failings. I don’t have much to add beyond the hyperlinks. (My review thread starts here, for my non-bluesky-addicted readers).

Instead, I’d like to take a step back and discuss hatereading as a genre. Because I’m clearly enjoying myself with this, but I’ve never paused to think through what it is exactly that I’m doing here.

This is the eighth hateread-thread that I’ve composed this year. It has become something of a running bit. (A couple people referred to me this week as “Bluesky’s Omelas child” and ohmygodIlovethat.)

The other books I reviewed were (1) Future Shock, (2) The Network State (far and away the worst book I’ve ever read) (3), Abundance (Which I didn’t actually hate, mind you), (4) After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, (5) Boom: Bubbles and Stagnation, (6) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I also wrote a thread about Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic, but I didn’t post a link to Substack and can’t track it down now.

What I look for in a hateread candidate is something that deserves it. The book has to have some juice. Most of these books come from Silicon Valley intellectuals, or from leading thinkers that Silicon Valley takes seriously. All of them tell us something about the stories that power elites tell each other. That’s the main quality I look for in a hateread candidate: It has to punch upward.

The other thing I look for is ideas that I don’t yet fully understand. I read Abundance and After the Spike with a hunch that I would disagree with the authors. But I didn’t know in what ways I would disagree with them. The livethreads aren’t just entertainment for the Bluesky sickos. They’re also the way I work out my own critical analysis.

I do like to pick books that deserve a bit of ridicule. I am, both by education and predisposition, an Alinskyite. Alinsky tells us that ridicule is our most potent weapon when confronting the powerful. In the present day, when the tech billionaires decide to compete in the marketplace of ideas by just buying the whole market outright, it sometimes seems like ridicule is the last, best weapon left at our disposal.

So the idea, simply put, is to read what they actually say, take it seriously, and poke fun at all the ways it makes no sense at all.

What I like most about the livetweet format is the ability to take screenshots/photos of individual paragraphs to show people what I’m reacting to. A proper book review is, by necessity, a distillation. It is shorter than the review thread, and includes only a select few quotes from the text. The review threads are sheer chaos by comparison. It has the energy of an unhinged book club, “look at this paragraph. I need to shout about this bullshit!”

My 2024 review of Nate Silver’s book, On The Edge is a good example. The review thread spanned 83 posts, over 3,600 words, 18 screenshots, and a handful of reaction gifs. That’s absurd. The proper book review was just under 1,900 words. That’s long, for a book review, but still much tighter and less shout-y.

As a writer, the livetweet threads are both more fun to write and less work to produce than a real review. In the Nuzzi thread, for instance, passages from the book basically function as setups, freeing me to just fiddle with the punchline.

The threads also free me up to write about tangential points that don’t merit inclusion in a book review. Olivia Nuzzi’s depiction of DC, for instance, annoyed the ever-loving crap out of me. Nuzzi equates the city of Washington, DC with the seven-block radius surrounding her Georgetown condo. That was so goddamn annoying, but it wasn’t one of the essential problems with the book. In a review thread, I’m free to share a paragraph, shout my immediate reaction, and then keep moving. In a book review, that point would inevitably be cut. I like that freedom, and the social permission to engage in tangential riffs.

One thing I want to make clear: it isn’t as though I solely read books that I dislike. I have read 132 books so far this year. It’s about 50/50 fiction/nonfiction. The three books that I read prior to American Canto were Laura K. Fields’s Furious Minds (Excellent), Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (a classic) and Antonia Hodgsen’s The Raven Scholar (possibly the best fantasy book I read this year). I intend to write an end-of-year post, highlighting some of the best books I read this year. The books-I-won’t-like only constitute 5-10% of my overall literary diet.

I’ve attempted to write livetweet-review threads of good books. The threads sputter out quickly, though. A good review thread has the feel of a good rant or a roast. It’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, but for books and through shortform text bursts. Stretching the genre to say “this passage is so well-crafted. I’ve been wrestling with this point, and the author really nails it” just doesn’t lend itself to long diatribes.

One of my personal resolutions for 2026 is to write more positive book reviews. They won’t begin as bluesky threads, but they’ll end up on Substack or in some more reputable publishing outlet.

But I’m also going to keep hatereading in 2026. Around 10% of the books I read will be candidates for long, sarcastic bluesky rants. And that will partially be because, hell, I enjoy it. But it’s also because I think there’s substantive value in taking seriously what the powerful say in public, and in pointing out their absurdities.

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There was a time period in recent internet history — call it the era of Big Data, or the platform era — when the large digital platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix) focused on optimization. The platforms had an immutable comparative advantage over their potential competitors. They had more data, more user engagement. They leaned on all that data and activity to refine and improve their products.

(To be clear, the platforms still have more data and more user engagement than any potential competitors today. It’s just that they don’t bother to improve their products anymore. Optimization is so very ten-years-ago.)

This was one of the themes in my friend and GWU colleague Matt Hindman’s 2018 book, The Internet Trap. It is good to be an Internet King. Google’s search results were better, and delivered faster, than its competitors. Netflix constantly fiddled with its recommendation algorithm, introducing customers to their next favorite show. Amazon could tell, based on your purchase and search history, what products to show you next. None of these services were perfect, but all of them were better-than-the-competition. Data optimization was a race to the top. The big platforms had a self-reinforcing advantage. And they took that challenge seriously.

These same observations were baked into my 2016 book, Analytic Activism. I was studying digital advocacy groups, not tech platforms. But the fundamental behavioral assumptions were all there — the bigger your list, the better you could use data analytics to engage in “digital listening.” The challenge for activists lay in thinking carefully about theories of change, and making sure you measured and optimized for the right things.)

I do not think we were wrong about these observations, back then. The research was solid. Matt’s book won awards, and rightly so. But what I have now come to recognize is that the focus on optimization was a time-limited social fact. Platform executives and their senior managers believed optimization was important, and they built internal reward structures that rendered it true. But this only lasted until they decided to discard it.

From the vantage point of 2025, optimization is clearly no longer a priority for the tech platforms. Google’s search results have gotten worse. Google doesn’t care. Facebook is awash in AI slop. It welcomes the slop. Amazon is filled with fake products and fake reviews. All of these companies still dominate their categories. Degrading the user experience isn’t costing them. The motivating belief that these companies had to optimize, or else they would be out-competed, no longer drives Silicon Valley behavior. Optimization was an era. That era has ended.

Let me jump on Cory Doctorow’s bandwagon here (his new book is really good, btw). We can go ahead and label the current internet era as the Enshittification era.

Doctorow treats enshittification as a process, rather than a time period. And he makes a strong argument. But optimization is a process too. So if the Internet of the ‘10s was characterized by the platforms’ shared commitment to optimization, then the Internet of the early ‘20s has been defined by the platforms’ shared embrace of enshittification.

History is complicated. Plenty of factors combined to pave the way for the enshittification age. My back-of-the-envelope list includes, at a minimum, (1) skyrocketing post-COVID tech valuations, (2) blockchain bullshit hastening the financialization of everything, (3) the surge of gambling-on-everything apps, (4) the bulldozing of the regulatory state, and (4) the tech billionaires having their precious feelings hurt by a workforce that sought to make collective demands and a public that didn’t applaud loud enough.

But also, it really kind of is Elon’s fault.

Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022. He didn’t have some grand plan. (Hell, he spent the summer trying to get out of buying the thing.) But he did have a working theory: the company was spending too much on delivering a high-quality product. You could fire most of the workforce, shut down the servers, turn off the peripheral services, and everything would still be *fine, basically*.

The counterarguments ranged from “lol it might all crash and burn” (It did, but only temporarily) to “everything will keep getting marginally worse and people will leave and oh also you’ll face millions in regulatory penalties.” (bingo)

The core of Elon’s hypothesis was that optimization was overrated. So what if the website loads slower, and the ads are less well-targeted? Elon saw opimization as a very expensive moat, and he quite publicly announced to his tech-billionaire peers that it was unnecessary. You can degrade the product. Your users will have a hard time going anywhere.

I publicly predicted Twitter would go bankrupt. I was wrong. But the reason I was wrong was that I expected the administrative state and the courts to move faster than they actually did. (I thought the FTC fines and the employment lawsuits would take six months. They took years. And Trump shut down all the FTC investigations as a favor to Elon, his largest investor.)

Instead of bankruptcy, X stayed upright long enough for Elon to sell it to sell it TO HIMSELF in an all-stock acquisition. And this matters quite a bit, because in the context of the tech billionaire groupchats, it proved Elon to be functionally right. Twitter/X is obviously worse now than when he acquired it, but not in ways that matter to the owners. The lesson for his peers was “Elon nailed it. We’ve been spending unnecessarily on making our products better. We don’t need to do that anymore.”

Eras rise and eras fall. I can’t say how or when the enshittification era will conclude, but it sure seems like it cannot last indefinitely. My hunch is that it ends with the collapse of the AI bubble. Much like the post-dotcom bubble years, a number of industry-defining companies will be bulldozed once the financial gimmicks fall apart.

I have trouble envisioning what comes after it. Too much depends on the how and the when of the crash (including whether David Sacks just bails all his buddies out). Just this week, a group of techies published the Resonant Computing Manifesto, which strikes me as a gesture toward what well-meaning people with skills will hopefully set out to build in the aftermath. I like the idea, but can’t quite wrap my head around the reality quite yet.

So, for the moment, I’ll leave this here as a partially-formed idea: Optimization was an era. It did not last. It was replaced by enshittification, as an era. It too, cannot last forever.

Here’s hoping the next era is something better.

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It isn’t that my 2018 warning was incorrect, so much as it now strikes me as dismally incomplete. What I had not counted on was that the tech platforms would be much more responsive to the demands of a rising authoritarian than they would be from pressure from their workers, or their users, or their civil society peers. A nervous monopolist is a well-behaved monopolist, but we are not the ones making the monopolists nervous any longer.

Take a look. I think it’s a good piece of writing.

Okay, now I need to yell about two news items. Because it seems like tech companies are treating Black Mirror like a goddamn Pinterest board.

Item 1: Last week, on the decaying husk of X.com, a former Disney Channel actor posted a 90-second advertisement for his AI company, 2WAI. The ad centers around “Baby Charlie” interacting with the avatar of his deceased grandmother. In scene 1, baby Charlie’s pregnant mother asks avatar-grandma for advice. In scene 2, she asks avatar-grandma to tell toddler Charlie a bedtime story. In scene 3, 10-year-old Charlie talks with avatar-grandma while walking home from school. In scene 4, 30-year-old Charlie shows avatar-grandma an ultrasound photo, and she reacts with delight. And then, in scene 5, we see Charlie’s mom recording a three-minute video with still-alive grandma, to upload for the avatar. Then the tagline: “with 2wai, three minutes can last forever.”

I’ve written before about the social role of technology (here, here, and here. It’ll also be in the book). Advertisements like this are meant to build hype and garner attention, but they also present a vision of how a new technology fits into our social world.

The 2wai commercial isn’t in the same genre as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei heralding the coming age of Artificial Superintelligence. The product they are promising is basically feasible with existing generative AI technologies. (Sora 2, etc) But the social vision is fucking ghastly.

There is a potential near-future where you could conceivably record a video of your parent and then offload much of the day-to-day interactions with your child to an LLM wearing their face and voice as a digital skinsuit. This was basically the premise for a Black Mirror episode (“Be Right Back,” S2 E1).

I do not think this product is going to gain traction, because I think people en masse are going to react in horror and never get over that initial, righteous sense of disgust.

Black Mirror is not a fucking Pinterest board, former Disney Channel actor! Your ideas are derivative and bad. Have better ideas.

Item 2: “Anthropic’s Claude Takes Control of a Robot Dog.” (WIRED magazine)

Season 4, Episode 5 of Black Mirror (“Metalhead”) takes place in a near-future dystopia where the scattered remnants of humanity hide from robot dogs that kill anyone they encounter. It is a dark tale.

WIRED’s Will Knight reported last week that researchers at Anthropic have taken steps to go build the damn thing.

“We have the suspicion that the next step for AI models is to start reaching out into the world and affecting the world more broadly,” Logan Graham, a member of Anthropic’s red team, which studies models for potential risks, tells WIRED. “This will really require models to interface more with robots.”

Anthropic, of course, continues to brand itself as the good guys in the AI race. They aren’t trying to build an AI-enabled robot army. They’re just trying to see if they can, before someone else1 builds the AI-enabled robot army.

And look, I continue to think that Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AI Doomer argument in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is weak and riddled with holes. I am not particularly worried that a runaway superintelligence is going to extinguish life on earth anytime soon.

But if you hook flawed LLM technologies up to robots, and then Silicon Valley defense tech companies arm the robots… a lot of things can very predictably go wrong.

This is bad and I hate it. The point of Black Mirror is to critique the current trajectory of how society makes use of new technology. The point of Black Mirror isn’t to give ghoulish AI entrepreneurs a fucking dream journal.

That’s all for now. I would prefer that “Black Mirror is not a Pinterest board” doesn’t turn into a running series on this blog. But <gestures everywhere> I guess we’ll see.

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I served on the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors from 2004-2010. I rejoined the board in May 2024. I will admit up front that, had I thought everything was going great with the Club, I wouldn’t have run for the board again. But the article bears little resemblance to the actually-existing organization and the challenges it faces. Saying that the Sierra Club’s problems are all because of woke is both entirely too trite and entirely incorrect.

As I see it, there are three big-picture trends affecting the work of organizations like the Sierra Club today. All of them are tough pills to swallow. Each deserves grappling with. And none of them fit within the frame of the article.

(1) This is a bad time to be the climate movement

It sucks to be the climate movement right now. Like, if you had to choose a year out of the past four decades to be the climate movement, 2025 is, experientially, probably the worst of the bunch.

And this isn’t, for the most part, because of strategic decisions made by movement leaders or organizations. It sucks to be the climate movement right now because Trump won the 2024 election and went ahead and did all the things we knew he was going to do. We knew last year that Trump winning would be a catastrophic setback. We did what we could to prevent it. We were not, y’know, incorrect about how this would all go down.1

The first Trump administration was bad too, but it at least coincided with the long-established cyclical burst of member engagement and donations. Trump 1 was structurally similar to Reagan 1. Your supporters come out of the woodwork when the causes they mostly take for granted are threatened. This meant that Trump 1 was substantively bad time, but it also functioned as a massive call-to-arms. As the old saying goes, every problem is an organizing opportunity. We sure had a whole lot of organizing opportunities, if nothing else.

The second Trump administration is structurally more similar to the second Reagan administration. The threats are deeper and more entrenched, but the supporters are no longer flocking to you because the second loss is less of a shock than the first.2

But in another sense, the second Trump administration is structurally dissimilar to anything we have faced before, because it is just such a constant barrage assaulting basic democratic norms. The administration has declared the entire subject of climate change to be a “hoax,” and is openly speculating about shutting down civil society groups that work on the issue. They’re tearing down the administrative state root and branch. They’re shredding everything else too. If you are an activist who cares about climate protection AND ALSO cares about not seeing masked agents disappear your neighbors in broad daylight, you’re gonna focus on the latter right now.

When times are this bad, there is a natural inclination to ask “what did we do wrong? How did we bring this misery upon ourselves? What course corrections will prevent it?” Those are always reasonable reflective questions, but it’s important to make sure your model of the world is accurate. Otherwise you draw the wrong lessons and make ill-advised course corrections.

Sometimes the actual answer is this was beyond our control. What we have to do is recognize the moment we are in, and respond to it.

The reason I’m mentioning this first is that it strikes at the heart of what’s wrong with the NYT piece. They start from the presumption that, if climate groups are in a bad spot right now, surely their own actions must be to blame. They must have lost focus or made the wrong demands.

The counterfactual we have to consider is: let’s imagine that climate groups during Trump 1 didn’t take part in “the resistance.” Let’s imagine they “stayed in their lane” during the Biden years, and never tried to expand their power base by engaging with communities that don’t have the same complexion and life experience as the historic environmental movement. In what ways, large or small, do we believe the state of the climate movement would actually be materially different right now?

And, big-picture, in that counterfactual alternate universe, it still sucks to be the climate movement right now.

It’s a comforting fiction, insisting to ourselves that “we already have enough power to accomplish our goals, we just have to focus and work real hard and be strategic. Any losses are our own fault as well.” But reality is much more complicated than that.

No one ever said the arc of history takes a straightforward path toward justice. Things are not going well for the movement right now. This is the period where critics start writing smug eulogies. The climate movement isn’t over though. It will continue to fight, and learn, and grow. The Sierra Club will continue to be part of that fight. There is plenty of work to do right now. We ought to draw the right lessons from the setbacks.

(2) Federated Civic Associations Are Hard to Manage, and Getting Harder.

This next point is Sierra Club-specific.

Most advocacy nonprofits are entirely staff-run. Volunteers are recruited and directed by the staff. The staff are the leadership team. The Sierra Club, by contrast, is a federated civic association. It has volunteer leadership, with chapters in every state and groups in most localities. The board is elected by the membership, from among the the volunteer leadership ranks. Before I joined the board in 2004, I had served on my local executive committee, chaired the Sierra Student Coalition executive committee, served on multiple national committees, and served as National Vice President for Training. The Sierra Club also has hundreds of staffers. The volunteers and the staff are all members of the leadership team. The org chart is not at all simple.

This sort of structure generates a lot of power, when it works well. Academics who research community organizing and political advocacy pretty much all agree that civic federations are good, and it would be better for their issue areas and for democracy as a whole if there were more of them. The activists form community, and build commitment to the organization, and develop democratic skills. It also takes constant effort to keep it working well. One reason I rejoined the Club board, despite really not having a ton of time for all the zoom calls, was because I am convinced, as a social movement scholar, that federated organizations are uniquely powerful and nearly impossible to start from scratch. I think you’ve gotta do what you can to support the ones that already exist, warts and all.

The 2020s have, broadly speaking, been a terrible decade. The decade started with a once-in-a-century pandemic and somehow managed to go downhill since then. And, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the pandemic years seems to have been especially damaging to volunteer-led organizations. This type of organization requires a deep well of shared identity and organizational trust in order to stay functional. When all those in-person meetings are converted to zoom meetings, while everyone endures untold psychic damage, all of the internal practices and routines that build up social cohesion break down without anyone noticing.

It didn’t help that, coming out of the pandemic, many progressive organizations were facing budget shortfalls. Those in-person meetings that transitioned to zoom meetings mostly just stayed zoom meetings, to keep expenditures down. But that’s no way to repair trust, and they make it even tougher to spot problems as they emerge.

This, more than anything, is the center of the problem that I see in the Sierra Club today. The habits of collective action, solidarity, and camaraderie have all frayed. This isn’t 100% attributable to the aftermath of the pandemic, but it’s probably north of 50%. COVID was uniquely bad for civic associations. And my sense is this is hardly a Sierra Club-specific problem. Other movement organizations have run into it too. But it hits harder when your organization has so many stakeholders, so many leaders, spending so little time actually co-present with one another. The Club has never been an easy organization to run — Our old Executive Director Carl Pope used to compare it to a bumblebee, remarking that “scientists suggest that it shouldn’t be able to fly, and yet it flies anyway” — and all those problems are amplified when budgets are tight and interpersonal relationships have frayed.

The NYT article rehashes a handful of episodes from the past decade and treats them as emblematic of some much larger process of, I guess, woke-ification? There was, for instance, the 2020 blog post (during the height of the George Floyd protests) that criticized John Muir’s early writings. A handful of Club leaders were upset about that blog post, feeling that it abandoned a historical legacy that we ought to be proud of. I guess a few of them are still mad about it, and took this opportunity to vent at a reporter about it. But, the thing is, it was just a blog post. From five years ago. The Sierra Club wasn’t spending much time discussing John Muir when I was involved in the 1990s or 2000s, and it is spending the same zero amount of time discussing the writing (inspirational or problematic or both) of our iconic founder today.

The article also frames a bunch of other incidents as evidence that the Sierra Club lost its focus on environmental issues. Those incidents aren’t related to the Club’s external campaigning, though. The executive team increased salaries for staff in the late 2010s (pre-pandemic, two executive directors ago). The Club established a new internal dispute resolution process in (I think) 2021. The rollout was not great, and a bunch of people complained. When I joined the board in 2024, the organization was already working on updating and fixing the process. The new process was finalized over the summer. It should work much better now. I literally have a Ph.D. in this stuff, and even I find it impossibly dry.

The Sierra Club didn’t stop focusing on climate activism in recent years. It did try to improve its workplace culture, and some of those internal initiatives didn’t work out the way they were supposed to. But they aren’t front-page-of-the-New-York-Times mistakes; they’re vent-about-it-over-several-beers mistakes.

(In other words: the Sierra Club has tried to make itself a place where lots of people, including *gasp* trans people, would want to be employed. And it has tried to make itself a place where lots of people would want to volunteer their time. And that has involved lots of boring procedural stuff, much of which is deeply unfun. But that doesn’t mean the organization wasn’t still aggressively campaigning on climate issues.)

It is flatly false to say the organization stopped campaigning on climate in favor of DEI or wokeness or whatever. The NYT authors seem to have gotten tripped up confusing internal governance initiatives with external campaigns.

(3) Every generation reshapes the boundaries of the environmental movement to suit its own purposes.

And here’s the biggest-picture point: The boundaries of the environmental movement have always fluctuated with the times. Every generation gets to decide for itself what environmentalism is going to be. And that is always a contentious debate.

For its first sixty or so years, the Sierra Club was pretty much solely focused on exploring, enjoying, and protecting public lands. In the 1960s, the movement expanded to include public health issues like toxic waste and pesticide runoff. The Sierra Club didn’t abandon its commitment to wilderness preservation, but it did expand the scope of its issue commitments.

This was not a smooth process. One Club board member, Alexander Hildebrand, dismissed Rachel Carson as “some woman who is not a scientist, [who] wrote a story about terrible pesticides.” Hildebrand thought the Sierra Club was diluting itself — losing focus — by taking up these broader environmental issues. Other directors, including Executive Director David Brower, saw it as responding to the moment. In retrospect, they were clearly right and Hildebrand was wrong.

In the 1990s, the boundaries of the movement expanded again, to incorporate a focus on environmental justice. The impacts of environmental pollution are not evenly distributed, and the movement had ignored the plight and concerns of frontline communities for decades. That, too, was not a smooth process. It never is.

Beginning around 2005, the environmental movement became centrally focused on the climate crisis. It also became more expressly progressive. This was not because movement organizations abandoned Republicans. It was because Republican elites polarized against our cause, and we came to realize that there was no direct path back to the bipartisanship of the 1970s. The ground shifted, and a new generation of environmental activists took up the mantle of deciding what the movement would be.

Something I have spent a lot of time thinking about is what the future of the movement ought to look like. I very much believe that we need an environmentalism that builds, but also an environmentalism that maintains a healthy distrust for corporate power. I do not expect this to be a smooth process. But I think it is a puzzle worth solving.

That said, the least-interesting-possible-version of this formula is oh no did the movement go too woke? Did the Sierra Club lose its focus?

If you know your movement history, the answer ought to be “which focus? Determined by whom?”

The people who drive the Sierra Club’s agenda are the people who show up and do the work. Every generation gets to decide what environmentalism ought to be. They respond and adapt to the moment, and do the best they can with what they have.

This is a hard time for the climate movement. It’s also a hard time for the Sierra Club. There is a lot of work to be done. But that NYT piece reads like a funhouse mirror. The story they tell bears little resemblance, either to the organization, the moment, or the movement as a whole.

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The vote is indefensible on the merits. The timing and politics are awful. This is the reason why practically no one who votes for the Democratic Party actually likes the Democratic Party.

And yet… I don’t ultimately think it will matter much in the grander scheme of things.

The U.S. political system is just about irreparably broken. The Democrats were “winning” the comms fight over the shutdown, but that’s a borderline-pyrrhic victory. Trump doesn’t care about his popularity, and he doesn’t care about Republican electoral losses a year from now, and he doesn’t care about mass suffering and loss. The guy went to the Supreme Court with a demand that he let him starve 40 million Americans. That’s both terrible substance and terrible optics!

And still the theory-of-change here is “well we hope that the electorate blames Trump and the Republicans for this, and keeps blaming them for another year, and then votes in such record numbers that they give the Democratic Party a slim majority in the House and Senate.”

That’s the best near-term theory-of-change available. But I keep looking around and thinking “yeah but that’s not nearly up to the task.”

The government shutdown was pretty much bound to end this way. At some point, the squishiest members of the Senate Democratic Caucus were going to to get too uncomfortable with all the pain and suffering for their constituents. They were going to ask “is this worth it for what we have demanded?” And they would eventually decide “nope, not anymore it isn’t.”

The alternate possible outcome would have been Senate Republicans perma-nuking the filibuster. I personally think that would have been good, because the filibuster is antidemocratic and bad. But that means the shutdown calculus has reached the point of “once enough holiday flights have been canceled, the Republicans will have to nuke the filibuster to reopen the government themselves. And then, haha, we will have… gotten them to enact procedural reforms that, if we all really wanted them, we could have just enacted ourselves the next time we have a majority.” And yeah, as embarrassing and frustrating as it is to watch the Democrats pause a footrace to tie their own shoelaces together, I can see why this was just about the point where the squishiest Senate Democrats said “we’ve lost the plot. We give up.”

What I’m trying to say is that this shutdown was always going to last until a handful of Senate Democrats got too uncomfortable and caved. Caving right now is indefensible. But it also would have been indefensible two months from now, after people starved and the airports mostly shut down and 60+% of the country was blaming Trump but he still didn’t notice because his brain is mostly soup at this point.

Sure, sign me up to primary basically every member of the Democratic Senate leadership. It would be nice to have a Democratic Party that stands for its commitments and isn’t always a news cycle away from folding.

But the politics of the 2026 election (and beyond) will be on basically the same trajectory with the government reopened as it would’ve been if the shutdown continued indefinitely.

We’re looking at a recession combined with runaway inflation. Either the AI companies are going to deliver unto us their digital god within the next 24 months or else the AI bubble is going to burst, and AI capital expenditures + stock market hype is basically the only thing keeping the economy upright.

Trump is going to keep sending masked goons to abduct anyone who looks like the wrong type of American to them. FEMA and the FDA and NHS and the CDC are so understaffed that avoiding catastrophes will be like dancing between raindrops. Health insurance premiums are going to skyrocket, and the Republican policy response is going to be some version of “shut up. No they aren’t.”

And meanwhile they’ll keep trying to gerrymander their way to a House majority, keep relying on their Supreme Court majority to reinterpret the constitution to mean whatever Republicans need it to mean this morning, and keep sending occupation forces into Democratic-run cities.

The shutdown wasn’t hampering Trump’s illegal actions, because he just decided that the parts of the government that he cared about (the new ballroom, mostly, it seems) were still operational. And his court majority was letting him do it.

All of that is bad. All of it will keep getting worse. And the public will continue to hate it. That’s equally true regardless of the shutdown.

So it would be nice if the Senate Democrats would stop scoring own-goals. It would be cool if the party-in-opposition wasn’t such a goddamn embarrassment all the time.

But the scale of the shutdown was never on par with the scale of the damage. It wasn’t up to the task. Nothing, in the very-near-term, will be. And on the longer timescale — the timescale it will take to repair the damage and enact democracy reforms — I pretty much expect this to become a forgettable episode.

Keep up the fight, even when our elected leaders won’t. We’re going to be in this for a long, long time.

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A list of short reactions that I desperately feel the need to get off my chest:

• Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay package.

I mean… Sure, whatever. Matt Levine had a good take on this yesterday, before the vote. If you are still at Tesla investor in November 2025, then you are pretty much by definition an Elon stan. Tesla is a meme stock with a price/earnings ratio hovering close to 300. The new payment plan only kicks in if Elon transforms Tesla into a $8.5 trillion company. That’s going to be hard to do, on paper, with declining car sales and an utterly pretend product line of personalized Optimus robots.

People on Bluesky were saying last night that he’ll never reach the pay package because it is a failing, flailing company. And I would like to agree with them, but I worry that these folks are underestimating the degree to which money — particularly stock market money — is all fake now.

I think it’s entirely possible that, over the next 5 years, Tesla sales will continue to decline, and the Optimus robots will be a Cybertruck-scale nonstarter, while, simultaneously, the company becomes a world-leading innovator in shady market manipulation and semi-fraudulent accounting techniques.

By November 2030, Tesla might just be fifteen circular funding deals in a trenchcoat — cash-poor and on the verge of insolvency, but also nominally valued at $8.5 trillion, granting Elon his performance bonuses.

Bookmark this for the next three years at least: it’s only accounting fraud if we have a functional administrative state and courts willing to enforce the law.

• Hahahaha Sam Altman wants the U.S. government to guarantee loans for his AI data centers.

Money is fake. Sam wants the government to guarantee that, if investors ever notice that his company is on the hook for $1.4 trillion in spending, with (maybe) $20 billion in revenues (WHERE’S THE OTHER $1.38 TRILLION SUPPOSED TO COME FROM, SAM???), then it will be someone else’s problem.

And the thing is, with David Sacks as the crypto and AI czar, Altman will probably get it. They’ll probably make Sam give the Trump family a stake in OpenAI or something, but then it’ll be bailout city. All these guys believe in free markets and libertarianism until the check comes due.

• The morning after Trump won the election last year, I wrote a list of predictions for what was coming. I just reread them and ohgodohgodohgod how has the past year been even darker than expected?!?

Here are the predictions. The only one that broke in our favor is that the anti-Trump resistance movement took awhile to get going, but is now bigger than ever.

• This is, effectively, the end of the regulatory state. Elon and the tech billionaires got what they wanted. All the (non-military) three-letter agencies will be hollowed out. The SEC and FTC won’t have the capacity to monitor financial crimes. The DOJ, EPA, HHS, etc will be run by political appointees whose sole charge is to reward Trump allies and punish Trump critics.

• The courts will provide no protection. Alito and Thomas will retire, to be replaced with younger ideological carbon copies of themselves. Conservative activist judges will have a 6-3 Supreme Court majority for at least the next couple decades. And the lower courts will be filled with Trump loyalists as well.

• Institutional media won’t be much of a counterweight either. The Washington Post and New York Times will still employ some great reporters, but they’ll either learn to toe the line or lose their press passes. And Trump’s lieutenants will likely make an example of some news organization. The First Amendment says whatever they want it to say now.

• The tech billionaires are going to start behaving like courtiers. I suspect this will be pretty seamless for them. They know how to conduct business with authoritarian states. They just watched Elon Musk bet hard on Donald Trump and get rewarded. Meta and Google and Apple aren’t going to stand up for American democracy. They’re going to compete to curry favor in the hope that those antitrust suits will disappear.

• This will all go pretty well for tech executives and the VC class, at least at first. You can make a lot more money through financial fraud than you can through selling products in a competitive marketplace. You can bring products to market a lot faster if you don’t have to worry about breaking laws. (Hell… Elon might finally deliver Full Self Driving Teslas. If you get rid of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and insist that any car crashes are covered by NDAs, what’s to stop him from just self-certifying that they are safe-enough?)

• And, to state the obvious, it will be terrible for everyday people. Women will lose access to medical care. Trans people will be targeted. Undocumented immigrants, and people who look-undocumented-enough-to-the-local-enforcer, face imminent harm. If you live in a community near a SpaceX facility, then Elon will just poison the water supply with toxic runoff. If you live in a blue state and get hit by a natural disaster, the government will withhold support. People will die of this, and the government response will be to loudly insist that they didn’t.

• I suspect the mass movement resistance will be smaller than last time. This is both because people are exhausted — if the progressive response in 2017 was anger, the response in 2025 will have moved on to depression — and because Trump (or his goons) will respond with violence. Trump wanted to use the military against George Floyd protestors in 2020. His generals said no. He’ll have different generals this time. And he’s going to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists. What do you think they are going to do when liberals start marching?

• The economy will take a bad hit, but only in ways that impact normal people. The stock market will keep setting records. Companies can put together some wonderful quarterly reports once they no longer have to worry about committing financial fraud. Housing prices will keep rising, but if you’re rich you can afford it. Unemployment will rise, reducing worker power and undermining the recent gains of the labor movement. It’ll be a great time for bosses, so long as you tow the party line.

• What progress we have made on confronting the climate crisis will be undermined. Trump will claw back the commitments we made to clean energy infrastructure investment. He’ll abandon the Paris agreement. The best-case-scenario is that the gains in solar, batteries, etc have been large enough that we still make some market-based gains. But we are looking at losing another four critical years to climate inaction, and we did not have those years to lose. Trump’s management of the pandemic will be a blueprint for his management of climate disasters: just pretend it isn’t happening, yell at the media for covering it, and ask Jared if he knows a guy who can fix things.

• There will be a parade of corruption and incompetence scandals. If I had to guess, I’d say RFK Jr won’t last long in the administration — not because any Trumpist will stand up for basic public health protections, but because he has served his purpose, and his ego is too voluminous to show proper deference. Expect lots of infighting. Anyone not related to Donald Trump by blood or by marriage will have only a tenuous grasp on power.

A few reading recommendations:

• I’ve been reading Hillary Allen’s ebook, Fintech Dystopia: A Summer Beach Read about Silicon Valley Ruining Things. Folks, this book is so goddamn fun to read. It belongs on the shelf right next to Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up.

• Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification is an excellent read. I have a draft post in the works, riffing on some extended themes that it left me thinking about.

• Damon Beres wrote an absolute barnburner in The Atlantic this week, “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here.” It’s about what the chatbot industry is doing to the internet, and to us all, because we haven’t created the types of regulatory friction necessary to stop them. And check out Max Read’s piece from last week, “Platform Temperance,” as well. The two pieces really speak to each other.

And finally, a music recommendation:

The new Mountain Goats album is out today! All hail Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan!

That’s all from me. Have a good weekend,

-Dave

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The cognitive largesse can take two forms. (1) Geniuses can innovate, gifting us with new technologies or business ideas, or (2) Geniuses can make large, magnanimous gifts to the less-fortunate.

If one buys into this political vision, then it stands to reason that you should never do anything to make the rich and powerful uncomfortable. Taxes and legal restraints and unions just slow them down and make them feel less generous. The path to building a better world necessarily runs through the better angels of their nature.

(I wrote about all this in my 2020 essay about the Clock of the Long Now. It’ll also be in the forthcoming book.)

In 2021, Bill Gates wrote an entire book titled How To Avoid a Climate Disaster. He took seriously that climate change was a generational threat. The better angels of his nature were up to the challenge. And he indicated in the book that he knew this would be a long, hard slog.

It has only been four years. By some measures, we have seen remarkable progress. The cost of renewable energy has plummeted. If we just have the political will to prevent fossil fuel companies from extracting market-bending favors, the trajectory of the energy sectors would look pretty damn promising right now.

But the politics of 2025 couldn’t be much farther from the politics of 2021, particularly in the United States. The Trump Administration has declared climate change a hoax. They are defunding scientific research and canceling already-existing clean energy projects. They are weaponizing the IRS to pursue political enemies, a list which includes the climate movement.

And meanwhile, centrist pundits from the “popularist” school of thought have decided that climate is a bummer of an issue, and are telling Democratic elected officials that the electoral cost of taking the climate crisis seriously outweigh the benefits.

This is a time when your fair-weather-friends flee to the hills.

And now it seems that Bill Gates has gone full Lomborg.

Bjorn Lomborg has been a mini-celebrity for around 25 years. His schtick, in a nutshell, is as follows:

• Climate change is real, but it won’t be all that bad.

• There is a finite and fixed pool of resources that humanity can spend making things better.

• So the responsible thing to do is to apply cost-benefit analysis and make sure our money does the greatest good for the greatest number.

• Aw shucks. It turns out that we can do way more good by focusing on mosquito nets and world hunger! Inaction on climate change is downright responsible, when you think about it!

Think of this as proto-effective altruism. Lomborg has been banging this drum since before William MacAskill hit puberty. He figured out long ago that there is money and fame in telling the rich and powerful, “everything will be just fine.”

But the other thing about Lomborgism is that it is always only just for show. His contribution to the public discourse has only ever been concern-trolling via white papers. It’s the equivalent of the “Firebombing a Walmart” meme.

Say what you will about Effective Altruists (minus SBF), but at least they actually raised some money for some worthy causes. The Bjorn Lomborgs of the world only ever bother to stand athwart social movement progress, yelling “no, not like that!”

Gates’s climate memo can only be read as a strategic retreat. He knew in 2021 that this would be a long, tough slog. But now it’s 2025 and he didn’t realize it would be this long or this tough.

He states that the effects of climate change will not be evenly distributed. That’s true, but it also has been well-known and well-established for decades. Everyone already realized this, and was saying it from the diaphragm, when he wrote his book in 2021.

He says climate change is real (gee… thanks Bill.), but we can’t cut funding for health and development. It isn’t the climate movement demanding cuts to health and development funding though. It’s Trump and Elon and the DOGE wrecking crew.

He insists that we’ve made real progress, all thanks to the cognitive largesse of technological innovation and the development of new markets. But he worries that the focus on carbon emissions will get in the way of economic growth and technological deployment. (We wouldn’t want climate targets to get in the way of AI deployment, would we? Heavens forfend!)

So now he thinks the best thing we can all do is keep the innovation engine humming, while turning our philanthropic eyes toward more-deserving causes.

Read between the lines, and you can spot the real concern: Bill Gates made a lot of bets on clean energy technology companies when the United States still operated under the rule of law. Under the Trump regime, the fate of Gates’s investments is tied to how Donald Trump and his close advisors feel about Gates himself. It’s a pattern we’ve seen from all the other tech billionaires: Make nice with Trump, give him gold trinkets, and publicly distance yourself from all inconvenient previously-held beliefs. Better to publicly break from the climate movement, and urge the delegates at COP30 to abandon their climate commitments, than to stand with the climate movement when the going gets tough.

It’s all ludicrous, of course. If Bill Gates succeeds in convincing the COP30 delegates to prioritize “human flourishing” over carbon emissions, that isn’t going to result in more dollars flowing to global poverty or public health. There isn’t a finite and fixed pool of resources to be distributed. More or fewer resources are spent on a variety of causes based on collective political will! Does he really think Trump et al are going to say “ah yes very good, now we will stop wreaking the global economy and public diplomacy and international aid efforts. What very wise points you all have made.”?

It’s pathetic, but it isn’t the least bit surprising. The fight against climate change was always going to require technologies and markets and a social movement with the political will to make inconvenient demands upon the powerful. This was never going to be easy, nor was it ever going to be quick.

Bill Gates and his pals were never going to be anything but fair-weather-friends to the climate movement, because they lack the political vision to imagine that the problems of global climate change are also problems of the global social hierarchy that they sit comfortably atop.

It’s a reminder of a basic truth about political contestation: power yields nothing without demand. We won’t create the world we want to live in by relying on the cognitive largesse of philanthropic tech billionaires. We’re going to have to build it ourselves.

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I also had the chance to join Greg Sargeant on his podcast to discuss how Democratic leaders can compete when the media environment is increasingly stacked against them.

The TL;DR version is that Dem consultants keep pretending we are living in 1992. Kamala Harris spent her entire campaign talking about her focus on “kitchen table issues,” and now a bunch of centrist consultants have released a report declaring voters think Democrats are out of touch! Time to nominate moderates, stop talking about climate and trans people, and message the hell out of “kitchen table issues!”

I’m not interested in relitigating the debate over what type of candidate Democrats should promote. (Read Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach. They’ve got that one.)

Instead, what I’m trying to argue is that the Democratic Party does not directly control voters’ impressions of the Democratic Party. Focusing on slogans and policies is a form of consultant tunnel-vision. If you want to succeed at political communication in 2025, you have to pay attention to the changing media environment. And this isn’t simple a matter of Republicans being better at social media. Republicans own all the social media platforms, and are buying all the mainstream media platforms. If you want to win elections, you’re going to need a bigger megaphone!

There’s more in the piece, please give it a read.

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Last month, The Atlantic published Adam Becker’s scathing review of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (“The Useful Idiots of AI Doomsaying.”) It’s a wonderfully pointed review of a book that deserved it.

I decided to read the book anyway. I know, I know… I should stop doing this. But livetweeting hate-read reaction threads on Bluesky has kind of become a thing for me. Everyone needs hobbies.

Adam is the author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, which is probably the best book I’ve read this year. (I reviewed it here.)

He’s also a friend. So, in lieu of turning my Bluesky review thread into a book review post, I figured it’d be more fun to record a video conversation with Adam where we discussed the book.

The recording is above. This is a new format for me. I thought it was fun.

Some highlights:

• Rationalism is to Silicon Valley as Scientology is to Hollywood. I think this is my best joke on the topic. Adam doesn’t think it’s funny, because it’s just plain true. Repeat exposure to the LessWrong discussion boards is functionally indistinguishable from mercury poisoning. (Rationalism isn’t exactly a cult, but it’s not not a cult, y’know?…)

• The basic problem is in part 1, where they can’t define intelligence, but just sort of handwave it away, “trust me, bro”-style. I know academic discourse can be exhausting, but defining your terms and evaluating their limitations is actually pretty important. Otherwise you end up building intellectual sandcastles and believe you’ve poured concrete.

• At least it is short. If you’re going to hate-read a book, hate-read a short book. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s editors tried their best. Ah, well, nevertheless.

• Adam imagines an alternate timeline, a better world, where Yudkowsky just becomes the mid-grade scifi author he clearly wants to be. I suspect, even in that world, he still goes the L. Ron Hubbard path and starts his own cult. <shrug emoji>

• There’s a blustering style to the book which is very discussion-board coded. As Adam puts it, it has the feel of a precocious teenager who never grew out of their worst habits and just decided “this must be how the world works.”

• Yudkowsky gets futurism wrong in a way that drives both of us just completely bonkers. Come on, Eliezer. You’ve been playing this game for several decades. Please learn the goddamn rules.

And, if you haven’t yet, you should buy Adam’s book. It’s really good.

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The first is an overvalued-startup story. Think Pets.com. Startups were massively overvalued. New companies were going public with no revenues and no business model. Everyone pretty much knew it was a bubble. But for years it kept inflating anyway.

Pets.com had the misfortune of being the company that signaled the end. The company IPO’ed, the stock didn’t pop, and that was the bad omen that the extended period of mass investor psychosis was over.

There wasn’t anything especially wrong with the company. They had a market niche and a great ad campaign. Decades later, Chewy.com would get the timing right on basically the same business concept. But when people think “dotcom crash,” the first image that usually springs to mind is that Pets.com sock puppet.

The second is a telecom story. Think Global Crossing. It was clear to a whole lot of companies that the future of the internet would involve fast connections over fiber optic cables. The telecom industry flooded the market with cheap fiber, underestimating the costs and overestimating demand. Figures like George Gilder were convinced that there would be a “Moore’s Law for bandwidth.” Gilder was catastrophically wrong. Part of the dotcom crash involved telecom firms burning a ton of investor cash, going bankrupt, and then selling off all that bandwidth at bargain basement prices.

The difference between the telecom story and the startup story is what they left behind in the aftermath. In November 1999, a startup called Compter.com received $5 million in its first funding round, and immediately spent all that money on a Super Bowl ad. When that company fails, it leaves nothing but a punchline in its wake. But when Worldcom and Global Crossing go bankrupt, they had tangible assets to sell.

And then there’s the Enron story. Ben Riley wrote an excellent piece earlier this year titled EnronAI, revisiting Enron’s role in the crash. The Enron story is fundamentally about accounting fraud, but it was very complicated accounting fraud. Enron played fancy math shell games. The complexity was kind of the point. Make your books complicated enough and you can convince people you’ve invented a newfangled valuation model, at least for awhile. The same dynamics played out during the great financial crisis, expect no one went to prison that time.

So those are our three potential narratives: (1) a startup bubble, (2) unrealistic capital expenditures, and (3) way-too-fancy financial chicanery. All three of these phenomena happened simultaneously, but the lessons we take from the dotcom crash vary depending on which story we emphasize.

You can see echoes of all three stories in the current AI bubble. We have AI startups valued at $12 billion before announcing any product. Capital expenditures on AI now account for something like 40% of U.S. economic activity. And the big players are all engaged in (ahem) “circular deals” so complicated you need to subscribe to Matt Levine’s newsletter to have the faintest chance of understanding them.

Even Sam Altman says we’re in an AI bubble right now. But what he has in mind is the first version of this story. The dotcom bubble had Pets.com, but also Amazon. Altman figures there are a lot of Pets.coms out there right now, but his company is the equivalent of Amazon.

For the past year, the AI data center construction boom has given off strong Global Crossing vibes. Microsoft, Meta, Google, OpenAI, and X.ai are all spending billions to build massive data centers. I’m just a simple political scientist who reads old tech magazines, but I cannot fathom how the costs of data center construction are ever supposed to be recouped from a mass user base that pays between $0 and $20/month for the products. (Read Ed Zitron for much more on how little sense these numbers make).

The Global Crossing version of the story tends to elicit righteous shrugs. Sure, the specific companies went bankrupt, but look at how valuable the infrastructure they left behind was! If you think we’re in a telecom-style AI bubble, then that spells trouble for the specific companies along the road to a bright and transformative AI future.

But with the latest wave of multibillion- and trillion-dollar dealmaking among the largest AI players, the vibes are turning decidedly Enron-like. Nvidia announced it is investing $100 billion in OpenAI, which OpenAI will then use to purchase Nvidia products. OpenAI announces a deal to buy $78 billion in chips from AMD, and is awarded 10% of the company in the deal, effectively offsetting the purchase.

None of these astronomically high-dollar deals are necessarily accounting fraud.1 It wasn’t clear in 2000 that Enron was accounting fraud either, though. Read Ben Riley. Enron was doing cutting-edge financial valuation something-or-other. Low-level and mid-level bankers couldn’t make sense of it, but they were overruled by their bosses who saw a feeding frenzy and wanted a seat at the table. It created a ton of shareholder economic value, right up until the whole thing vaporized itself. The same was true of FTX in 2022. If the crypto market hadn’t precipitously dipped, the fraud at the center of FTX never would’ve been exposed.

What we can say for certain right now is that these massive deals are based on increasingly complex financial shell games. OpenAI — a company that constantly needs fresh injections of investor cash, because its costs are bigger than its revenues — keeps announcing deals to spend billions of dollars to acquire stakes in chip manufacturing companies. Unless they invent digital god and completely transform the entire global economy, like, really pretty soon, they’re inevitably going to run into some hard accounting realities.

This is, obviously, not financial advice. I’m not a finance guy. It’s also not legal advice. I’m not a lawyer. All I am is a guy who pays close attention to the history of the digital future and constantly finds himself muttering “history doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme” under his breath.

But I’ll say this: the AI bubble isn’t predominantly giving off Pets.com or Global Crossing vibes anymore. It’s giving Enron vibes. When the dust settles, we’ll probably see a whole lot of books written about the fancy math games that convinced investors that two companies passing $100 billion back and forth were creating $200 billion in value instead of having a net financial impact of $0.

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