The data comes from Adobe’s Analytics platform customers, and it paints a fascinating if incomplete portrait of how consumers conduct their online research. Yes, traffic from AI chatbots has risen more than 1000% since last summer, but….on what base? Take a look at this chart:
I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.
For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.
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Nearly every conversation I’ve had over the past month has involved some variation of this question: What are you reading right now? The question isn’t about fiction, or even books – it’s about news. Most of my friends and colleagues are trying to avoid reading (or watching) too much of it – we all know the Trump playbook, and if he’s going to flood the zone with shit, well, best to stay out of the zone.
Yesterday I was having lunch with a fellow islander, a man whose built his career in marketing and communications. He asked the same question, and mentioned he’s been dissatisfied with the usual fare consumed by members of our tribe – the Times, the Post, the New Yorker et al – the “mainstream, liberal media” as defined by our current leaders. I agreed – and told him I’d recently cancelled my Post subscription (the whole Bezos thing is getting to be too much) and that I rarely read full Times pieces unless they’ve been forwarded to me, usually via email or text. I’ve been off Twitter for over two years, and BlueSky is better, but my feed has become a litany of complaint, which isn’t exactly helpful.
So what do you read, he asked again? I mean, really read? And that’s when it hit me: I read my inbox. Over the past decade or so, it’s become my morning (and afternoon, and evening) paper. I want a filter between me and the media, and I wanted that filter to be made up of humans and brands that I trust. As a medium, email is tempered – I only get things I’ve opted into getting. There’s no algorithm or AI, spam gets deleted instantly, and I chose what I open, and when I open it. It’s pretty much the opposite of how our current media ecosystem works. When the newsletters from mainstream media come in, I’ll browse them, but I rarely click through. Instead, my diet consists of a lot of individuals, and a ton of niche newsletters.
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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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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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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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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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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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If you want to understand where the zeitgeist is headed in Silicon Valley, you have to study The Information, the clubby, well-sourced favorite read of Valley oligarchs. The publication made its reputation by commanding lofty subscription prices back when nearly all tech news was free; it now enjoys multiple revenue streams, including advertising, events, and a “pro” version for $750-$999 a year. I’ve been a subscriber (of the “regular” variety) for years, and I probably always will be.
That said, every so often The Information runs a story that is so clearly aligned with the interests of the plutocracy it begs to be called out. “Advertisers Retreat From Social Media Policing” is its latest entry in this category. The piece opens with a stupendous straw man: “For several years, a favorite tactic of progressives agitating against social media and conservative news outlets has been pressuring marketers to pull their ads.”
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(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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