Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

Do You Trust The Conjurer? (Predictions 2026, #1)

Cecco de Caravaggio The Conjurer (The Musician) c. 1600-1620

The modern English verb ‘to conjure’ is derived from the Latin conjurare, meaning ‘band together by an oath, conspire.’ Its roots con (‘with’) and jur (‘legal right or authority, law’) echo with questions central to our present day struggle with technology: Who do we trust to determine authority? Why do we believe in them?

Conjuring also evokes magic, sorcery, and wonder, essential elements of the tech industry mythos. My earliest pieces on the impact of generative AI leaned on the metaphor of magical “genies” doing our bidding in a relationship bound by loyalty and trust. Do those genies work for us, or are they the product of conjurers beyond our control? Do they demand faith, or instill it?

Read More
Leave a comment on Do You Trust The Conjurer? (Predictions 2026, #1)

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Battle Lines Are Drawn (Predictions 2026, #2)

The 1960s ain’t got nothing on today.

I concluded my post “Magic and Mayhem” with a bit of a tease about the impact of AI on our society:

There will be lots of magic this year. But there will also be plenty of carnage as previously unbreachable moats start to crumble, not only in business, but also in society at large. For more on that, stay tuned for prediction #2. 

Read More
1 Comment on Battle Lines Are Drawn (Predictions 2026, #2)

Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?“, Fred notes the parallels between the browser wars of the late 1990s and the present-day battle for dominance in the consumer AI market. And he asks a prescient question: What new, world-defining product might we be missing by focusing on AI chatbots?

In the early days of the Web, everyone thought the most important new product to emerge from the Internet was the browser. Netscape, a startup with just a few months of operating history, defined the market for those browsers in 1994, then dominated it for several years thereafter. But by the late 1990s, the lumbering incumbent Microsoft had stolen Netscape’s lead by leveraging distribution and pricing advantages inherent to its massive Windows monopoly.

Read More
2 Comments on Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

The Planet Is Warming, But Our Speech Has Chilled

Image from the AlphaEarth launch.

More than a decade ago I was working on a book about the impact of data on society. I was obsessed with a maddening and seemingly impossible idea: What if we could track every single piece of data that mattered in the world, and from that data, gain unimaginable insights that would shake us into an entirely new age – the equivalent of moving from Medieval times to the Renaissance?

Of course, I was struggling with this thesis well before AI became mainstream. I knew that the compute and algorithms needed to turn my musings into reality were on the horizon, but I simply could not find a way to realize the concepts I sensed were playing out all around me. I felt like Captain Ahab, madly chasing a spectral leviathan of data. I spent days staring out at the ocean from a rented cottage on the beach, imagining every molecule of water as information dancing across sentient processors. It was about this time that I made an uneasy peace with my ambitions to be the next Gleick or McPhee. Rather than submit to the insanity of the matrix, I abandoned the project, and it has haunted me ever since.

Read More
Leave a comment on The Planet Is Warming, But Our Speech Has Chilled

Tech And Society’s Faustian Bargain

Capture.

I led my predictions for 2025 with the dog-bites-man observation that technology has eclipsed finance as the most powerful industry in the world. More than six months into the year, I’d like to emend my conclusion. Tech hasn’t eclipsed finance. It has captured it. 

Finance has always leveraged technology – at Wired in the early 1990s, we were fond of saying that technology’s twin engines of innovation were money and sex – but the most interesting story was always money. Care to understand the future of internet infrastructure? Bone up on how hedge funds optimize network latency. Want to peer into the future of online consumer services back when the Web was a glint in Marc Andreessen’s eye? Start with online banking. 

Read More
Leave a comment on Tech And Society’s Faustian Bargain

If You Trust AI, You’re Asleep. (At Least You’re Not “Woke”)

Today brought so many stories worth “notes and observations” that I thought I’d try something new – a flash newsletter of sorts, with commentary on stories that pushed my eyebrows up a bit more than usual. Each of these items is worth a full-fledged long-form piece, but it’s Friday, so let’s be brief:

Do You Trust OpenAI? Over the past two years I’ve been warning that when it comes to long promised “user agents” that work on our behalf, AI companies would inevitably adopt the big tech playbook of providing centralized services that they control, ensuring that consumers are dependent on their platforms and by extension, locked into their services. This architecture is anathema to true innovation in a modern data economy, but inevitable given the capital constraints of current AI models. Well, this morning brought news of OpenAI’s “Agent,” which purports to “take over” our computers and take action on our behalf. As I’ve asked, over and over, is this the way we want the future to unfold? Who exactly do we think OpenAI’s agent really works for? Hint: It’s not us, anymore than Facebook, Amazon, or Google ended up working for us.

Read More
3 Comments on If You Trust AI, You’re Asleep. (At Least You’re Not “Woke”)

Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

 

Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.

Read More
Leave a comment on Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

Fourth in a series. Previous installments: 

The Standard, Part 1 

Read More
Leave a comment on The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning

A good place as any to lose your company.

Note: Third in a series. First post, second post.

The Oak Grove cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts encompasses roughly ten acres of rolling woodlands and narrow dirt roads. Its 1,800 or so headstones date back two centuries, making Oak Grove a relative newcomer as New England graveyards go. I’ve been visiting this sacred, spectral spot on the island of Martha’s Vineyard for nearly five decades. Half my family is buried there. 

Read More
4 Comments on The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning

The Trouble With Bees

This is not a honey bee.

There’s this throwaway conceit in the current season of Black Mirror that keeps tugging at me, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d think out loud about it.

In Episode 1, “Common People,” the protagonist, a school teacher, is lecturing her young pupils about pollination. She casually explains how robotic bees have taken over for their organic ancestors, buzzing from flower to flower and, one presumes, keeping the world’s agricultural ecosystem from crashing. The exchange is meant to contextualize the episode as happening sometime in the near future – most of us know that the bee population is crashing, and the concept of autonomous insect drones doesn’t feel that far off. It’s also an elegant reference consistent with one of tech’s most fundamental beliefs – don’t worry, kids, technology can and will save us from ourselves!

Read More
2 Comments on The Trouble With Bees