Writer, content strategist, coach and your pal
One of my favourite people on social media is Darth . Darth takes an annual hibernation, in which time they do not post or, presumably, read. I’d love to say that I have not posted anything for months with the same level of intention, but alas not. It just&
I've been a Stratechery subscriber since it started and one thing I have noticed about Ben is that he occasionally gets a little overexcited about stuff that is probably not totally close to his wheelhouse. This is one of those times. In his opening about Tesla's
I still don’t agree that men can’t stop thinking about Rome , but I’m definitely thinking about it today. When Roman emperors distributed grain for free to the urban poor, they weren't being charitable, and it certainly wasn’t an egalitarian desire
1 The knowledge class and its enemies Writing for The Nation , Elizabeth Spiers reaches for Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to frame something that should have been nagging at the edges of tech criticism for quite some time. Hofstadter's great insight was that anti-
Credit where it's due. Anthropic's system card for Claude Mythos Preview is a genuinely interesting and thoughtful document. Most AI companies publish safety evaluations the way governments publish freedom of information responses. They're technically compliant but strategically uninformative. And that's usually deliberate,
There is a sentence near the beginning of Arielle Roth’s remarks to the Media Institute’s Communications Forum luncheon , delivered in Washington on 25 February, that is worth sitting with before we do anything else with it. “Every major advancement in communications technology has shifted who
In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either.
Good evening chums and pals! This has taken me a little while longer to put together, basically because I came back from MWC in Barcelona with a little gift: a delightfully productive cough which has got me feeling a little tired, as I’m (obviously) not sleeping all that
Ben Thompson, Another Viral AI Doomer Article, The Fundamental Error, DoorDash’s AI Advantages : What is notable about this assertion is the total denial of any positive reason for DoorDash to exist and to be so successful. There is no awareness that DoorDash provided a massive consumer benefit (restaurant
Hi all. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It has been a week dominated by AI. Which is fitting because AI dominated the weeks before it and will dominate the weeks ahead. That’s part of the reason I haven’t written for a
1. Airstrip 404 is here Paris Marx explores the unsettling reality of digital sovereignty in this article , arguing that the global reliance on U.S. cloud infrastructure effectively turns every data centre into a strategic military asset. With the power to leverage the control of tech giants to enforce "
1. What goes around comes around Back in the day, everyone hated Quark. And I mean everyone , at least unless you worked there. If you worked in publishing you had to use QuarkXPress. They knew it, and charged accordingly. It was very expensive software, customer services was awful, etc. But
When Saul Bass released Phase IV in 1974, audiences expected a standard ecological horror film about mutant ants overrunning humanity. What they got instead was something stranger: a slow, geometric meditation on communication, evolution and intelligence. Yet beneath this peculiar narrative lies a deeper conversation about the power relationships between
Hello! And welcome back. I have had an extended break over Christmas and the New Year. The one benefit of being useless at taking my holiday allowance is that I usually end up taking December off, and so it proved again this year. This one is a bit of an
1. Lawyers, assemble! Authors v OpenAI part 273. A judge has ordered disclosure of internal communications about dataset deletions. This sounds incredibly dull, but it matters fin determining whether there was willfulness in OpenAI’s blatant theft, and that, in turn, determines how much indamages they are potentially on