Category: Internet Big Five

Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position

Look, I’m not much of an AI image-generation prompt writer.

This isn’t going to be a normal year.

2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration’s cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology – capital is king – the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.” The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk’s approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.

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Can Bluesky Do Advertising Right? Yes.

Chart compiled based on various web sources for both early Twitter and recent Bluesky growth.

I’ve been in the business of making new kinds of media companies, media platforms, and media technologies since before the Web was born, and in every case I’ve partnered with the advertising industry to make it happen – an industry often reviled as the driver of “surveillance capitalism,” the attention-mining, data-driven monster supposedly at the center of the Internet’s enshittification. 

So I wasn’t shocked when Bluesky CEO Jay Graber acknowledged last week that advertising might be in the company’s future. The company is growing at a blistering pace, adding tens of millions of users in a matter of months. It costs dearly to service that kind of growth, and the company has investors to appease. Bluesky’s growth mirrors Twitter in 2008 – 9009 – the year that Twitter first raised capital at a billion-dollar-plus valuation. Twitter proceeded to introduce advertising as its core business model one year later, in 2010.

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The Tragedy of Generative AI 

Yes, I have no patience for perfecting image prompts using AI.

Listen up, tech oligarchs; lend an ear, simpering brohanions. We’re doing this generative AI thing all wrong, and if you continue down your current path, your house of cards will fall, leaving all of us wanting, but most importantly, leaving you out of power. And given that you value power over all else, it strikes me it might be in your own self interest to consider an alternate path. 

Here’s the problem: you’ve managed to convince nearly all of us that sometime real soon, generative AI will deliver us powerful services that will automate nearly every difficult and/or deadly boring task we currently have to perform. From booking complex yet perfectly priced itineraries to delivering personalized health diagnoses that vastly outperform even the most cogent physician, your AI agents have us starstruck, bedazzled, and breath-baited.* 

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The Token Act – A Modest Proposal from 2018

I’m in the middle of a rather large project, attempting to consolidate a thread running through roughly a dozen essays I’ve written over the past decade or so. I keep running into borked links when I hit one particular piece – which can be found on LinkedIn, but not this site. It’s a seminal reference post about a fictional “Token Act,” which I proposed while researching Internet policy at Columbia back in 2018. I’m going to repost it here, below, so it’ll live on my own domain from now on. 

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Social conversations about difficult and complex topics have arcs – they tend to start scattered, with many threads and potential paths, then resolve over time toward consensus. This consensus differs based on groups within society – Fox News aficionados will cluster one way, NPR devotees another. Regardless of the group, such consensus then becomes presumption – and once a group of people presume, they fail to explore potentially difficult or presumably impossible alternative solutions.

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Bluesky, Twitter, and “The Open Network”

Emily Liu at Bluesky has a timely post that I’d like to respond to. (Back in the day, when blogging was a thing, we did a lot of this – someone would write a thoughtful piece, then many others would write responses. These organic, mostly high-quality “backlinks” formed the backbone of Google’s early web dominance, but I digress, somewhat, because it’s all related).

In any case, Liu’s piece, entitled “Benefits of an Open Network,” uses a series of simple metaphors to explain how Bluesky is different from other social networks. Most readers already know this, but just in case, here’s the core of it: Bluesky is an app built on an open protocol, which means Bluesky users can engage with any other app which conforms to that protocol. In other words, Bluesky lives in an open network, albeit a rather limited one at the moment. Here’s Liu:

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Don’t Repeal Section 230. Clarify It.

The 26 words that “changed the internet.” Image NYT.

(This is a column I wrote for Signal360, P&G’s companion publication for its Signal conference, which I co-produce. It’s always fraught to weigh in on this fundamental piece of Internet legislation, so I welcome your thoughts!)

It’s difficult to find anything Congress agrees on these days, but when it comes to the much-misunderstood policy known as “Section 230,” it’s unanimous: this piece of 20th-century legislation needs to be fixed. And while such a fix may be needed, it could have a significant impact on how every company goes to market. 

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Technology, Humanity, and the Existential Test

I’m still digging through some of the pieces I posted at the now defunct NewCo Shift, and found this piece, adapted from a talk I gave at the Thrival Humans X Tech conference in Pittsburgh back in September of 2018. I was alarmed by trends that I saw intensifying – a push by the tech industry to deregulate their power, the growing influence of private company algorithms on public domains, the rise of autocratic politics and “technocapitalism.” Six years later, it feels like I could give this talk again today, nearly word for word – and it’d be even more relevant. 

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From the Archive: Tech Must Get Over Its Superman Complex, Or We’re All Screwed

Detail from the cover of Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Five years ago I was posting a lot to a publication called NewCo Shift, which is now offline. I got ahold of the archives, and found this review, which hasn’t lost any of its relevance – in fact, it kind of reads like it was written last week. 

Everyone in tech loves Yuval Noah Harari. This is cause for concern.

A year and a half ago I reviewed Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, recommending it to the entire industry with this subhead: “No one in tech is talking about Homo Deus. We most certainly should be.”

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What’s SearchGPT Really About? Moving Past the Training Data Dilemma.

This morning we awoke to one story dominating the tech news landscape: OpenAI is “expanding into search,” launching SearchGPT, a prototype that appears to be a direct competitor to Google (and Bing and Perplexity, not that they really matter). But despite the voluminous coverage, my initial take is that once the hype cycle passes – I give it a day or two – OpenAI’s true goal will emerge: fixing the optics of its approach to training data.

The company doesn’t have the resources to take on Google on its core turf. So why announce SearchGPT now? This is speculation, but I’d wager it’s because the company is in a perilous place. It built its business – one that could lose up to $5 billion this year – by scarfing up the entire Internet, mostly without permission. It’s facing a serious backlash from both established publishers and governments. In response, it’s been busy cutting deals with as many partners as it can, and this search prototype feels driven by those optics.

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Ads, Ads Everywhere

The Times’s piece decries all the ads on TV. But is this a surprise?!

The advertising world is uncomplicated at its core, and utterly bewildering when seen from the outside. The easy bit stems from a simple axiom: Wherever you can find the attention of potential customers, you pay to get your message in front of them. That’s the essence of advertising: paying for attention. It gets complicated by the details – the medium, the message, the targeting, the tech – but wherever customers gather, advertising will follow. There’s simply too much money to be made for it to be otherwise.

So it was utterly unsurprising to learn, a few hours ago as I write this, that there will soon be ads on PayPal, driven by the data the company collects. PayPal recorded 6.5 billion payments in the first quarter of 2024 alone, according to the Journal. The company plans on creating what’s known as a “retail media network” allowing advertisers to leverage PayPal’s data to target users both on platform and off.

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