Soundtrack: Spinnerette - The Walking Dead - (Alt: Postmodern Jukebox - Radioactive) Thanks so much to everybody that has supported me in the last year. This newsletter started as a way for me to process the complex feelings I have about the technology industry, and still remains, in a
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest&
Before we get going — please enjoy my speech from Web Summit, Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? I didn’t write the title.What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What
Soundtrack: Post Pop Depression - ParaguayI haven't wanted to write much in the last week.Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could&
Soundtrack: EL-P - FlyentologyAt the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job performance is
Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of duty as Senior Vice President of Search, becoming Google's "Chief Technologist." An important rule to follow with somebody's title in Silicon Valley is that if you can't tell what it means, it probably doesn&
You cannot make friends with the rock stars...if you're going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist. First, you never get paid much, but you will get free records from the record company.[There’s] fuckin’ nothin' about you that is
OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after
Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom.In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft'
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a
The latest episode of my podcast Better Offline is a conversation with Matt Stoller — America’s leading voice on monopoly and antitrust matters, and a thoughtful and prolific writer. You can find Matt on Twitter here, and his newsletter here.It was a timely conversation. At the
Last week, in the midst of the slow, painful collapse of the generative AI hype cycle, something incredible happened.On Monday, a Federal Judge delivered a crushing ruling in the multi-year-long antitrust case filed against Google by the Department of Justice. In 300-pages of dense legal text, Judge Amit Mehta
Soundtrack: Masters of Reality - High Noon AmsterdamI have said almost everything in this piece in every one of these articles for months. I am not upset, but just stating an obvious truth. The current state of affairs effectively pushes against the boundaries of good sense, logic and reason,
Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at
Want to listen to this interview instead? Download the latest episode of Better Offline! You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you can insert an RSS feed.Last week, I had the privilege of interviewing Daron Acemoglu — one of the world’s most