Here’s the TL;DR:

• Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era, which was based on users having control over their data
• Tools at that time began giving creators the power to decide what license they wanted to release their content under, including permissions about how it could be shared, used, or remixed
• Because the people who made platforms back then were users and creators themselves, they thought about the long term and wanted to be able to preserve people’s work
• After lots of corporate shuffling, Flickr ended up in the hands of a family-owned company, SmugMug, and they made the Flickr Foundation to preserve public photos for the next 100 years
• NASA’s images should only be on a service where they can be stored in full resolution, for the long term, dedicated to the public domain — which the other social media apps of today can’t do

The Photographic Record

First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.

Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)

With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.

In Focus

Flickr wasn't a social platform first — it was a photography platform first. That means it was designed to store high-resolution versions of every image, and didn't distort pictures with things like filters. Every image showed details like what kind of camera had taken the photo, and even what specific settings were used to take the shot. People started building communities around the then-new idea of using tags to help them find content by topics online — an idea that would directly influence the creation of hashtags on Twitter a few years later.

Another core idea of the time was a firm belief in open data: people should own and control their own work. Eventually, some experts (including a then-teenage Aaron Swartz, who we'd later talk about in the early days of Markdown) created a set of standards called Creative Commons licenses, now maintained by an organization of the same name. Flickr made it easy for users to describe what permissions people had for reusing or remixing any photos they posted. (I was helping out with a blogging platform back then, and I think we were the first tool to support this stuff. It felt like a big deal at the time!)

People's Flickr images started popping up in corporate PowerPoint presentations or commercial advertising almost immediately. A little sidebar: the incredibly positive and generous intent of these open licenses has since been exploited by extractive Big AI companies, who ransacked all of the images on Flickr that had permissive licenses without any consent from, or compensation to, the creators. That might be legal by most readings of the licenses, but if you have hundreds of billions of dollars and don't think you should at least have a conversation with the photographers whose work you're using, you're probably an asshole.

Archival Prints

Our close-knit community of people building the new era of web apps was keenly aware that our users were creating culture. This realization brought a huge amount of responsibility — not just in enabling users to express themselves, but in thinking about the long term for people's ownership of their works. Public institutions had just begun to use these platforms, which meant that the content being shared wasn't just a nice picture to look at: it might be socially or even historically significant.

What happened in the years that followed was… a lot of corporate machinations. Flickr got bought by Yahoo. Flickr's founders left Yahoo. Yahoo got bought by Verizon. You can imagine how all of that went; the details aren't all that important, except to say that by the time Instagram launched, Flickr had begun to fade into obscurity. People were focused on mobile phones instead of the desktop, on sharing square images with filters instead of full-resolution photography, and on connecting socially instead of caring about photos as art or a cultural record. Nobody would post the canonical historical photo of an event with a Valencia filter on it. Most of Flickr's users moved on, rarely checking their old accounts — until a family-owned photo service named SmugMug bought the service from Yahoo. A human-scale operation with some actual heart and a love of photography was a much better home for the platform than some random division of Verizon.

Commons Sense

In 2022, the new team at SmugMug that owned Flickr decided to focus on Flickr’s larger place in culture. Many major institutions around the world had chosen to archive their public photos on Flickr because of its superior support for high-resolution imagery, its unique ability to declare explicit legal licenses (including public domain licenses), and its long-term reputation for reliably hosting content without any of the harms or abuses that typical social networks had inflicted on users. Museums around the world had entire catalogs on the platform, and governments routinely used it to document their public events. When I had a photo taken at an official White House event with President Obama, his team sent me the final image afterward by sending me a Flickr link; when Zohran Mamdani met King Charles, the NYC Mayor’s Office shared those pictures on Flickr, too.

The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world. (You should absolutely donate to support the Flickr Foundation in their mission to preserve these vital public resources for many years in the future.)

It’s in this context that NASA has long been sharing its imagery on Flickr, for all of its missions — not just Artemis II. There’s even a special section for NASA on The Commons. And since everything is provided in incredibly high-resolution and has every single detail about the photo and how it was taken, it’s possible to combine the information about the photo with other data and create amazing resources like this beautiful timeline of the entire mission. You can see Hank Green’s wonderful narration of his inspiration and creative journey behind the timeline right here:

Why Not With Us?

Anybody who’s read my site for a while knows that I’m a huge proponent of owning your own website, and having your own content live there. Shouldn’t NASA, of all institutions, have their photos live on their own nasa.gov website? Well, yes! But.

One complication is that many large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!), and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.

In contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful technologists can be very effective in maintaining content over a timescale of decades. The SmugMug team has been very thoughtful in managing both their business and their technical infrastructure in order to sustain Flickr’s public archives for years to come. (Though, as mentioned, you should still donate to ensure they can keep doing so!)

What’s more painful is the more recent threats to public stewardship of this kind of content. The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

We’ll be glad to have archives like Flickr’s in the future, and people around the world will be glad for its place in archiving even much more mundane aspects of culture.

Taking off

I was honored to get to reflect on my long history with Flickr, and with online community, in an interview with my old friend Jessamyn West, for the Flickr Foundation’s blog. In a conversation that unspooled over a few months, I think we covered so many of the themes that resonated in what I’ve mentioned here, and what struck me most was how much I wanted a new generation of people on the internet to have their own version of the communities and experiences that we got to have when sites like Flickr were first being made. People still cherish those values!

The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades. Then, others who do some of the most ambitious and astounding things imaginable can build on that work to inspire us. And then, some more regular folks can build on top of that and help us waste a little bit of time just clicking around on something fun. That’s what the internet is supposed to be about!

This isn’t just about recounting old web lore — this is about explaining the internet we have right now. Hank’s timeline site is brand new, entertaining a whole new generation, and probably the majority of the audience who are looking at it weren’t even born when Flickr was first conceived. But the reason he can build that site is because of the values and the inventiveness of the team and community who created a platform like Flickr — and because those kinds of values are durable. They might not be as loud or flashy, but they are still everywhere, quietly enabling a lot of the things we enjoy most every day.

Public dollars helped make a fascinating community, then public dollars enabled a breathtaking journey into space, and then a public commons helped a creator make a novel way to explore that journey. Lots of people chose, over and over, to be generous with their genius. These are all gifts that a bunch of strangers gave each other, over hundreds of thousands of miles, and many years. Inspiration is all around us!

That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.

We’re in another one of those big inflection points for AI. Trump administration policymakers for AI suspended access to Anthropic’s newest product. All of these policymakers have a web of investments in competing players — including SpaceX, which is about to IPO — and the corruption and grift of this cohort are so extensive that it’s impossible to judge what the actual risks and reality are around any of these platforms or technologies, since no one involved is an honest broker.

It’s a shame

More broadly, there’s been the widespread pushback against AI culturally, one that is undeniably strongest amongst those who were born in this century. But the adoption patterns and usage data show that even younger people are using some AI tools. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen before, with social media. We have a significant group of people knowing that a technology contradicts some of their values, preferences, or beliefs, but using it anyway.

Sometimes it’s due to the coercive nature of the platforms themselves, and how they insinuate themselves into our lives, to the point where we don’t even realize we’re using them. Sometimes they are forced upon us by the creators of the platforms, since they have so much power over the devices we use, and the tools that we rely on for things like doing our jobs, or communicating with our loved ones or our communities.

There are millions of people who don’t like that they’re using LLMs provided by the Big AI companies, but end up using them anyway. Just like there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t like that they’re on the giant social networking platforms like Facebook, but end up using them anyway. The feelings that people walk away from those experiences with are often guilt, or shame, or embarrassment, or resentment — all some of the most negative and destructive emotions that humans can experience.

Actual alternatives

But if people want to get the benefits of some of these technologies, without either the shame of supporting the harms of Big AI, or the unpredictability of being beholden to corrupt billionaires bickering with one another, there are finally starting to be other options. As I mentioned in (One) Good AI Is Here, it’s possible for creators working in their own communities to now make AI tools that serve their specific needs, without causing all the harms that make people object to Big AI.

This feels like the true alternative to the narrative of “inevitability” that so much of the hyper-funded AI industry is trying to push, while also not forcing people into a quiet life of AI guilt if they still find some utility in some aspects of these tools.

Right now, those who (rightly!) object to Big AI due to their platforms’ impact on the environment, or labor, or their extractive use of content without consent, or its many other potential harms, are generally not aware of, or often open to, the idea of there being small, human-scale tools created by and for communities that are accountable for those tools over time. But my suspicion is that it is not only possible to make these tools, there may in fact already be many of these tools in existence, and we’re just not as familiar with them because they’ve been quietly serving their specific niches without having multi-billion-dollar campaigns promoting them.

What I'm unabashedly hoping to do (and I think the Guardian story reflects some momentum in that regard), is shift the narrative from focusing on running away from the bad thing in AI, to finding the good thing that we're running toward. There are alternatives that we could be affirmatively choosing, ones that look at questions like the one I asked more than a year ago, "What Would "Good" AI Look Like?", and offer answers that might give us hope instead of just the righteous rage and anger we feel when we let our imaginations be constrained by the limits of what Big AI offers.

But for them to lose, everybody else in the ecosystem has to carry out the nearly-lost art of platform strategy. Tech companies (and even open source communities!) used to carry out these tactics in emerging product categories ranging from desktop office suites to operating systems to web browsers, though over the decades, the lesson that big tech learned was, basically, that they should play dirty.

You win platform strategy battles through power and persuasion. We're going to get both.

Historically, we would have relied on regulators or media to help hold bad actors in the tech space accountable, but in the United States, these entities are largely not going to help very much. Some state and local governments may assist, and some independent journalists or smaller media outlets are pushing for accountability, but the most powerful entities are either captured or complicit in many cases, so we don’t have the institutional pushback that had sometimes been present in earlier points of technological change.

The thing that matters right now is that we understand that all of the Big AI companies are extremely vulnerable. The reason they’re making so much noise, and spending so much money, is because they know that they’re vulnerable. Users, and especially users who are developers have an enormous amount of leverage to control where AI goes. And if those communities of users can coordinate, they can put power back into the hands of the people. Today, that means focusing on some technical interventions, along with the cultural and political pushback that’s happening. That’s how we begin to reduce, or even prevent, some of the worst AI harms in the future.

Here are some of the proven tactics that have helped shift the balance of power in prior tech reckonings:

1. Get in front of it

The first and most important technical goal is for everyone to push for all AI usage to be disintermediated — where users access their AI apps or services through open tools or interfaces that aren’t controlled by the Big AI companies. These tools, in the form of “harnesses”, or through text editors or command lines, or just through the familiar chat interfaces that lots of people use, need to move as quickly as possible to being controlled by community-built, open options. The sooner this step happens, the sooner we unlock the ability to shift decision-making power out of the hands of the corporate platforms, and begin to undermine their ability to cement lock-in of users.

Status: Good. There are a number of popular, mature tools in almost every category for users who want to access today’s AI tools through a free, open interface. Most of the work now is to get the word out about these tools, and to continue to polish and improve the user experience so that they offer features and design touches that the commercial tools can’t or won’t.

2. Spread the love around

Another key capability that the open ecosystem must provide is the ability to seamlessly switch between different AI providers on the fly, to reduce costs, to provide better performance, or to get both benefits. In many cases, this will be seamless and automatic, just making the right choice for users so that they get the best option all of the time, but advanced users will want to tweak their settings, like when businesses may want to be very aggressive in minimizing the amount of money that their employees are allowed to spend on AI services.

The important part here is that this forces AI platforms that want to compete to remain compatible with all of their competitors, keeping the market dynamic, and ensuring that all of the big providers are easily replaced with another vendor at any time. Basically, we always have to be able to keep them in their place, and they should know that they could go away at any time. Most companies are aware of these needs, but the more regular consumers are familiar with these kinds of requirements, the more pressure there will be on companies to conform with standards. (This is also what will enable the disintermediation mentioned in point 1.)

Status: Good. This is happening already in business environments, where companies demand this kind of flexibility. Developers have been creating very dynamic systems for switching between AI providers, and the ecosystem encourages this kind of switching by extensively comparing different AI platforms against each other whenever new models are released. The important thing to maintain here is the narrative that none of the individual models matter more than the overall ecosystem — and that even the biggest companies have to conform to the same strict formats and standards as the independent AI systems created by communities around the world.

3. Free the tools

Another vital concern for shifting power away from the Big AI companies is undermining them economically. Instead of simply following the classic “commoditize the complement” strategy that commercial companies often execute, open source projects created by a community can more straightforwardly pursue a path of enlightened value destruction. Non-commercial LLMs have been roughly keeping pace with the Big AI platforms, following the pattern I described as “frontier minus six”, where free and open models lag about 6 months behind the most cutting-edge AI labs — which means they’re still pretty freaking great for most uses.

In a scenario where there are extremely capable models that cost nothing except for the price of keeping a few servers running, as well as very robust tools that make it effortless to seamlessly switch between models (see point #2!), more and more organizations will shift more and more work away from the Big AI companies, especially as those companies keep raising their prices.

But there’s no reason that these same principles can’t be followed by ordinary consumers as well. Many developers are already using these techniques to switch to free models to save money, and the only barrier to this practice becoming more widespread is that the user experience is still too clunky and technical for most regular people.

Status: Okay. Lots of people are working on this, and in some scenarios, the free AI tools are even pretty great. But for the most part, there are still too many compromises in either the end results or the user experience for this to be a mainstream alternative today. This can change, with the right investments and focus on improving things — and focusing on differentiation in areas where the open community can distinguish itself from all of the Big AI companies.

4. Get angry too

Pretty much everybody who’s from the 21st century, or anybody who’s a creative person, is pretty furious about AI. Anyone who’s not oblivious to culture is aware of that. Yet all of the Big AI companies keep treating it like some fad that’s going to blow over, or a trend that they can just steamroll with their dollars. This isn’t going to go the way they want.

However, the people who will build the alternatives can actually listen to the values and criticisms of the people who are angry, and make tools that respect and respond to what they’re saying. An Internet of consent is not only possible, it’s all around us, if we choose to respect it. If people hear that they can get some of the conveniences or features that they were previously told were only possible with extractive, exploitative, evil AI tools, but without any of those negatives, they’ll actually be pretty happy to hear it.

Today, usage of AI is high enough that even some of the people who hate AI are using it. Some of this is due to the coercive way that AI is being shoved into everybody’s faces, some of it is due to there being some places that people feel it has utility that they wish they could access without its moral compromises. When people are compelled to use platforms that they object to (as a lot of people feel about using things like social media), the feelings of guilt and resentment that come along with it are deeply toxic.

What we're talking about across these first three points, if taken together, is an entirely new experience for millions of users. And that new set of platforms could respect the consumer backlash against AI and channel it into presenting tools that acknowledge their anger and treat it as legitimate. They might even be tools for fighting back.

Status: This one’s going to be tough. This is the one idea where most people think I’m crazy. People who have a righteous anger about the harms of current Big AI companies say that there couldn’t be any such thing as “good AI”, and I understand their skepticism. People who think AI is an interesting technology but hate the hype (the majority AI view) are usually skeptical that the open community could make offerings that are good enough to compete against the big commercial offerings. And AI enthusiasts are pretty skeptical that AI critics would ever come around to seeing any technology in this category as being acceptable, no matter how thoughtfully it was created or presented.

I think there’s enough anger at the trillionaire predators to go around, though.

Let’s get to work

It’s been a long time since we succeeded in wresting control of a nascent space away from the tycoons trying to take it over. But it’s pretty clear what the stakes are this time, and it’s also clear that the window for changing the path of the AI world is closing pretty rapidly.

Obviously, this kind of shift won’t be easy, but I think people would be pretty surprised how possible it is. There’s a snowball effect that happens once folks start to understand that there are appealing alternatives to the things that are making them miserable. An entire generation needs to discover that enshittification is not only not inevitable, it is downright preventable, and the power to do so rests in our hands.

If you’re a developer, you have an extra responsibility: are you vetting your work against this list? If nothing else, you need to be doing so just to ensure that you have a chance of having a career over time. But it’s also the right thing to do.

And if you’re not technical in that way, you don’t have to become a developer, but you can familiarize yourself with these concerns broadly — even if you hate AI and never want to touch the stuff! — so that you know what argument to make about how to shift the balance of power.

The most important thing to know is that, as so many people have said, none of this is inevitable. But the way we fight that inevitability is with a more exciting, human, powerful alternative, not merely by repeating what we’re saying no to. We are not simply angrily running away from something, we can all be joyfully running toward something together.

Bonus Footnotes

In the early days of tech blogging, one of the biggest reasons that so many people got used to reading Joel Spolsky’s blog was that he’d often write amusing little fables that shared key lessons about product strategy. Strategy Letter V (on commoditizing your complements), or How Microsoft Lost the API War, or Fire and Motion, or… Platforms. If you can squint past the turn-of-the-century mentions of Microsoft Excel, there are lots of interesting lessons there.

To my great surprise, that list of suggestions on how to make better documents got a pretty huge response, and a lot of people told me they found it really helpful. So now, I've created a Better Documents skills.md file for people who use LLM tools like Claude to help assist them in creating business documents, to prompt their AI tools to make better documents by default.

If you're not familiar, agent skills are simple text files that describe new capabilities or processes that LLMs can take advantage of when carrying out tasks. (They're Markdown files — more proof of how Markdown is taking over the world!) The way this skill works is that it's distilled the broad principles I outlined in that post into a series of 5 tests, covering areas like whether you've properly considered your target audience, whether the overall structure is correct, if you've overdone things with your formatting, and if things are named clearly, and then either generates a new file that follows those rules, or reviews an existing document to make sure it is obeying best practices.

It's nothing too fancy, but I've been using it for a while, and shared it with a few friends, and people have told me they found it handy and it's improved some of their routine documents. I'm especially glad that people have found it useful even if they're the kind of folks who would never let an LLM generate a document on their behalf, but do think software tools are useful for things like spell check or grammar check. I see this as being a tool in that kind of category.

If you're familiar with skills, the install process is really simple and works just like any other skill. This skill is totally free and open source (if you have improvements, send along a pull request on GitHub, or if you're not a coder type, just email me or hit me up on social media and let me know what fixes/suggestions you've got), so there are no encumbrances or restrictions on its use. I am curious if it's useful to people, especially if you find it handy to use more broadly at a company, so don't be shy to get in touch if you find it valuable.

Here's to us all enduring fewer terrible presentations!

So today, I’m sharing an open source project called Dashboard Touch, which lets you make your own Touch ID-style sensor for your Mac, using low-cost off-the-shelf part. It’s based on an extensive refactoring of the excellent tinyTouch project by Zimeng Xiong, who recently cracked the code on how to make a useful fingerprint scanner system that’s also reasonably secure for regular Mac users. (You should definitely check out his project and support his new hardware build if you’re interested in this stuff.)

I took my own approach to this work because I wanted to focus a lot on having a friendly web interface for configuring exactly how the fingerprint sensor system works on your computer. When you get Dashboard Touch set up, it presents you with a nice web interface that runs right on your own Mac, letting you do things like set the color of the ring light on the fingerprint sensor, or capture your fingerprints so they’re recorded in the system.

Behind the scenes, the way the system works couldn’t be simpler. You buy a little fingerprint sensor, and a small microcontroller, wire them together (it was actually fun to get back to soldering stuff!), and then plug them into your computer with a regular USB cable. After you run the setup script, you just go to the web interface and add your finger(s) to the system.

Once you’re running, your Mac runs as normal, except any time the system prompts you to type in your password, you can just swipe your fingertip on the sensor and Dashboard Touch will type your password in for you. At a technical level, the device is actually literally pretending to be a keyboard. (You can look over the code on GitHub and get a feel for the approach pretty quickly.)

After it’s installed, it’s basically a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. You don’t need to do anything else for it to Just Work. Your password is only ever stored securely on your Mac, and your fingerprints are only ever stored securely on your sensor. You can erase them at any time and nothing talks to the internet at all except the one manual update checker, where you can see if there’s a new version of Dashboard Touch, but only when you intentionally click the button to request it to do so.

Overall, this isn’t the kind of system you should use if you’re protecting a bank vault, but if your computer is physically secure and nobody is going to have extended unsupervised access to your Dashboard Touch setup without your permission, you should be fine.

Dash, not bored

Personally, it’s been really fun to get back to making things. As you can see in my introductory video, I ended up creating an enclosure for my fingerprint sensor in my woodshop, so that it would match my desk that I recently built. Even creating and editing the intro video was a fun project that took me out of my usual comfort zone.

Nearly every task in this project has had me stretching to do things that I’m pretty bad at, from firmware coding to security review to detailed carpentry to video editing. But I just love the idea of putting things out there again for people to hack on, and there's also something really satisfying about being able to be super-opinionated about the design and user interface of something after so many years of working on teams where I had to collaborate. (Even though I always got to collaborate with brilliant people, it's different when you get to pick every pixel!)

I just also have been missing the era of the web when most of what I saw online was weird and fun things that regular people were building, and I realized that I can't mourn the absence of those kinds of projects unless I invest my own energy into building some of those kinds of things myself. So, here's one! Let me know what you think, and if you've got any ideas for how to make this thing better. Or, of course, if you find any bugs that I should fix.

I hope you have fun touching the blinking lights!

As a result of the power differential between those pushing AI and those fighting its advances, the typical rhetorical tactic for AI critics has been to try to attach stigma to the use of AI, and to the outputs of AI systems. There is also little cultural discussion, or even mention, of alternative offerings that aren’t from the Big AI companies, so the entire narrative is framed as either using the most harmful, exploitative, damaging AI tools from the likes of OpenAI, or using nothing at all.

And for the most part, this has been pretty effective for people who have any taste or sense of culture. If you’re a creator, or engaged in creative culture, you probably either can’t stand the AI aesthetic, or feel betrayed when you find out something that was appealing to you was AI-generated or made by someone who used generative AI to create it. The only creative discipline that’s broadly an exception to this is coding, where for the most part people don’t have as many aesthetic objections, but even there, people pretty stridently object to the slop aesthetic in user interfaces and other human-facing aspects.

There are, of course, diehard cohorts of AI advocates who insist that they love the AI aesthetic and don’t mind the hyper-real look to what these systems output, but the mainstream discourse in the arts, design and creative disciplines reached a consensus some time ago, and it’s fairly stringently enforced amongst fan communities.

But shame isn’t an effective strategy for stopping the advance of Big AI as a force in society. I’ve said before that scolding people out of using these tools hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work. What I want to get at here is why it structurally can’t work — and what has to replace it.

Shame is already priced in

I wish shame and stigma were more effective ways of driving or changing behavior in society in general. It has been a project in many social circles over the last 15 years or so to remove shame as a social curb on bad behaviors, and this has largely succeeded; this is why we see the richest man in the world monetizing accounts that share child sexual abuse material on his social network, and the president of the United States having been found liable for sexual abuse, and no one holds these men to account, or is even unwilling to be seen with them. Having grown up fluent in an Asian culture, I’m well aware of how shame can shape entire communities’ functions and norms.

But in the particular case of how new technologies shape society, trying to use shame to drive behavior change isn’t an economically effective tool for curtailing the impact of bad actors. During the rise of the social networks, when we first started seeing the kinds of harms that they could cause, many activists and academics who wanted to champion alternative approaches tried to shame people out of using the then-dominant platforms. That stigma persists — you still see people today who are half-embarrassed when they talk about how they’re “still” on Facebook. But they are on Facebook.

People being embarrassed or ashamed while still using the technology does not bother the authoritarian owners of those platforms in the least, as long as they’re profiting off of those ashamed users.

That pattern repeated with the gig economy. Though the #DeleteUber movement early in the first Trump administration was briefly very effective at scaring Uber’s leadership, they quickly adapted to the criticisms people had, and most people have forgotten they were ever supposed to be angry in the first place. They knew they could weather the brief shame or stigma that was attached to using the app.

In short, the venture capitalists and CEOs of Silicon Valley have priced the costs of shame into their business plans. It may make creative communities feel good to shame people about using AI (and maybe that has some purposes for social cohesion amongst those groups), but it rarely stops people from using the platforms at all — it just makes them quieter about it.

Whenever I say this on social media, a bunch of really angry folks come into my mentions and say “you love AI and slop and why don’t you go give Sam Altman a hug” even though my bona fides of criticizing these tech tycoons go back to when the angry people were still in diapers. But I don’t fault people for having spare reservoirs of rage aimed at the harms that the authoritarian billionaires have done to their world; I just want them to aim their rage more effectively.

Are we being effective?

We have to care more about being effective than we care about being “right”. We have to care more about power and actually winning than we care about merely dunking on people. (And I mean, dunking on people is fun! It just can’t be the only thing. And it doesn’t win any converts.) I wish we would learn one goddamn lesson from our failures to stop the last several waves of tech adoption, where we’ve just kept repeating the same failing patterns, preaching to the choir with our platitudes while regular people all get fed into the insatiable user acquisition maw of big tech, social stigma be damned.

I’m lucky enough to be the kind of NYC policy nerd who saw Zohran Mamdani’s first campaign video when it came out, right after Donald Trump won a second term. It’s worth a re-watch, but in short, what he does is go to the Bronx and engage with folks in one of the areas of the city that swung hardest toward Trump during the election. And he just starts asking people what they care about, why they voted that way. One of the most remarkable things about the video is, Mamdani doesn’t argue with anybody, he just listens, and then he asks them if their life would be better if their rent were frozen, if buses were free, if childcare were affordable. Perhaps most relevant to this point, he doesn’t shame them, even though they had very obviously made a devastatingly self-defeating choice. He gave them an affirmative alternative to move toward, and in doing so, empowered both those people and himself to do something better.

This is the kind of solution that most AI critics are not allowing for right now when they only picture a shame-based corrective to individual people’s use of AI. It is possible to build human-centric, empowering tools and platforms that are owned by the people instead of by billionaire tycoons, that are responsible about the environment and with people’s data and privacy, that are accountable to the communities that they serve. If we engaged every person who made some AI slop and said, “would you rather have tools that help you make something amazing, and brought you into a community of creators?” I don’t think anybody would say no.

And truthfully, I think two big reasons why critics don’t use that framing instead are due to laziness and arrogance. It takes a lot more time and effort to engage with people over time and to bring them into community. It’s a lot easier to dunk on them, and then return to one’s existing community of peers who will praise you for saying how ugly that person’s slop was. But that won’t stop the Big AI companies.

We need a new theory of change if we care more about stopping the harms of Big AI than we care about feeling righteous. The good news is that it already exists, in pieces: there are tactics for winning the platform war, there are direct actions that ordinary people have already used successfully, and there are alternatives being built right now that are worth pointing people toward. What’s missing isn’t the alternative. It’s our willingness to offer it to people instead of just yelling at them.

There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.

I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.

Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.

How Venture Capital became Cancer Capital

I’ll be breaking these points down in further detail, but just to begin framing the concept, I’ll lay out the core idea here in some bullet points (so that you’re not tempted to run this whole thing through an LLM):

• Venture capital was only supposed to be a tiny segment of the overall capital market, but it has expanded to become the primary form of funding that new companies consider — it was never the only way, and it didn’t used to be the default one
• VC was meant to be a small percentage of overall investment because it represents the high-risk, high-reward part of a portfolio; to be healthy, most of a portfolio — or most of an economy — needs to focus on assets that are more stable and predictable. But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host.
• As regulations have gotten looser in recent years, a handful of venture capital firms have become “do everything” funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses, and expand to manage massive stockpiles of tens of billions of dollars
• The 1% of VC firms that get this big stop being exposed to the risk in their own investments at all — when you collect 2% a year to manage $50 billion, that’s a billion dollars landing in your pocket annually whether any company you funded lives or dies. Those firms also stop legally even being venture capital firms, making them unaccountable to markets, founders, or the law — and that’s how they become “Cancer Capital”
• Meanwhile, the 99% of “normal” VCs don’t have the power or funding of the Cancer Capital firms, but are forced to play on the field that those firms define, even if they don’t like the way they do business
• Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
• The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
• Politicians and media still look at VC as if it works like it did 10 or 20 years ago, and cheer them on like they’re funding job creation or enabling new companies to grow, when their primary goal is concentrating power and wealth into the hands of the Cancer Capital tycoons. They keep getting fooled by this, over and over.
• These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
• The shift away from IPOs in the tech industry has also encouraged these Cancer Capital firms to find ways to cash out long before companies ever go public, meaning they can make a massive return off of companies that never make a penny of profit, even if regular investors get screwed by the stock of a company once it actually gets listed on the public stock market.
• Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.

All of this self-dealing, and the way that they’re isolated from any accountability, has made these firms become more and more shameless in their behavior. Former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell publicly called out the firm (a rarity — the company is notoriously vindictive towards those who it decides are disloyal) for what he called its “political infiltration” of AI policy. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and their firm have put $115.3 million into this midterm cycle — nearly double their $63 million in 2024, and more than any other billionaire donor in the country, even including Elon Musk. Molly White, whose Tech Influence Watch tracks this money against FEC filings, shows that a16z alone accounts for more than 20% of all political contributions from the entire cohort of crypto and AI companies it follows. And they’re funneling these funds to candidates in both parties. This is a huge escalation from the tentative baby steps that folks like Zuckerberg were making in the Obama era, working on benign issues like trying to help immigrants.

And of course, it gets a lot worse than just their lobbying. As I have frequently noted, Andreessen Horowitz hired a man as a partner at their firm despite his having no background or qualifications in tech, finance, or startups whatsoever. His only discernible qualification was that he had choked my unarmed neighbor Jordan Neely to death on a subway car.

This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.

Up next: we’ll dive into the specifics of many of the points laid out above, to understand more about how we got here.

First: The companies that defined the modern era of tech weren’t founded with venture capital.

Neither Microsoft nor Apple took a penny of venture capital funding when they were founded. Both got started from money they got from their founders and their first customers, and took off from there.

Building for the ages

In Microsoft's case, they didn't get any venture capital investment until the company had been around for six years, and were already doing $17 million dollars a year in revenues. (That was a lot in 1981!) The founders didn't need any startup capital at the beginning because they basically formed the company in order to serve their first customer, and had revenues from the start. More strikingly, Microsoft didn't close their venture capital funding until after they had made their deal with IBM and shipped MS-DOS — the deal that actually made Microsoft into the industry-dominating player that they've been ever since.

And, tellingly, in that funding round, Microsoft only raised $1M from David Marquardt, less than 6% of their annual revenues.

Apple followed a roughly similar pattern. The Apple myth is that they got their initial funding by Steve Jobs selling his VW bus and Woz selling his HP calculator. (Woz told me that story is basically true, not just one of those Silicon Valley narratives that people like to make up.) Their third founder Ron Wayne (the guy everybody forgets about) got too nervous about having to take on liability for the debts that come with starting a new business, and took off. Apple did get some funding in the years that followed — longtime Apple exec, and sometime CEO, Mike Markkula helped fund the Apple II with less than $100k of his own money. And the Apple II was what made Apple the dominant player in personal computers, turning them into the industry force that they've been (except for that near-death moment in the 90s) ever since.

Like Microsoft, Apple didn't take any venture capital funding until January of 1978, when it raised about half a million dollars, nearly two years after it was founded. By then Apple had shipped two products and was already profitable.

These stories were well known and often repeated in the tech industry that I joined at the start of my career. These facts were part of why everyone understood that venture capital was not only not necessary for a company to succeed, but was a resource that was added after a company had already cemented the fundamental strengths that would ensure its success.

Microsoft and Apple had built the businesses and launched the foundational products that would make them legendary before they ever took a single penny of venture capital funding.

The math starts to shift

I'm not telling you these stories out of some nostalgic love for the olden days of computing; there were lots of terrible things about that era, and there have certainly been plenty of harmful actions from both Microsoft and Apple in the years since. I think it's simply essential to reset the framing of what it takes to build a meaningful company at scale. The context of that era matters, because it gives us a useful reference point for everything that follows.

I first learned about venture capital when the startup I was part of in 2003 got its first round of funding. It was for $600,000. Yes, there was a time when an A round of funding was $600,000. What's more, that amount was just about equivalent to what we made in revenue that year. (I'd helped write the business plan, so I knew that we had raised roughly what we earned.) It seems very quaint now, but in the shadow of the dot-com bubble bursting just a short time earlier, even this size of an investment made headlines in the tech trade press.

By the next year, I met David Marquardt myself, as he joined the board of the company and we raised $10 million dollars, at a time when we were probably making at least $4 or $5 million dollars a year in revenue. The key thing here, and why all these numbers matter, is because you can understand the math. It's a fairly straightforward calculation to see what we had to do to get the company to a size where that investment made sense. (And, as a side note: the economics had changed — we were one of the first consumer subscription service products, and one of the very first to run on Amazon Web Services.)

Adjusting for inflation, and accounting for the difference in relative revenues, venture capital had certainly gotten more ambitious in the 23 years since Marquardt cut a check for Microsoft, but it wasn't different in kind. Now, venture-backed companies still often defaulted to compensation structures that were wildly inequitable, and were deeply exclusionary about who was allowed to pitch or get funded. But the core mechanics of how the financial operations were meant to function were possible to discern.

Basically, you could still put all this shit in a spreadsheet.

Where we're at

For a look at the current venture capital landscape, let's consider something like Project Prometheus, which launched in November of 2025. It's an AI startup that's supposed to work on stuff like factories and manufacturing, and it's a Jeff Bezos thing. By contrast to our A round of funding in 2003 of $600,000, Project Prometheus had a seed round of $6,200,000,000. That's not their A round — that's the seed round. Fortunately, that little bit of dipping their toe in the water went well for them, and seven months later, they raised another $12,000,000,000 at a valuation of $41 billion. Not too bad for a company with 150 employees, I hope that scrappy bunch of dreamers can find a way to get by.

And they're not alone. Yann LeCun (he's the AI guy who used to work at Meta, and was supposed to be the nice guy with a conscience here, until surprisingly that clashed with Zuckerberg's priorities) started a company called AMI Labs, and they launched with a billion-dollar seed round, which immediately became the largest in European history. Ineffable Intelligence (AI from ex-Google DeepMind guy David Silver) raised $1.1 billion, without even so much as a published roadmap. And there are lots more. Putting aside these giant headline numbers, just looking at the overall range, the median Series A in America right now is nearly twenty million dollars. When I raised a $30 million A round for Glitch in 2018, it was one of the biggest consumer product A rounds in the entire industry, and was based on both us having had extraordinary user growth and our founders having founded multiple massive companies; just 8 years later, it's below the average for startups overall, including those started by people with no experience and companies with no product or no users.

The difference over 45 years is stark: Microsoft, with a hit operating system and seventeen million dollars a year coming in the door, raised one million. Prometheus, with nothing to show at all, raised six thousand, two hundred times that. Yes, they've got a founder who is enormously rich and famous. But they don't have any products! Or customers! And people hate their founder so much that Katy Perry's album tanked!

Where does that leave us?

But the point isn't the multiples or any complex math. It's simple stuff that a kid with a lemonade stand could understand if they were borrowing money from mom to buy lemons. We raised about what we earned, and then later about twice what we earned, once we had a good idea where things were headed. My biggest mistake in my last startup was over-raising, not seeing how far things had already slipped down this broken path, even though we had a lot of substance to back up what we were doing. And now we're in a place where Prometheus raised $6.2 billion dollars against no discernible product or revenues. There's no reasonable way to value nothing, or to have a ratio against nothing. There's really no way to value a second round of nothing.

But if you're an investor in that follow-on round? Where the valuation increased by billions even though there is no product and no customers? You've already made a massive windfall. You may even have already made enough to turn your entire fund profitable, just on this one deal. Google, which used to employ David Silver, invested in Ineffable Intelligence. And Google will likely be both an investor in its future rounds and potentially the acquirer of the company if and when they ship any products or have any customers, so they will also be able to count the increase in the value of their investment in the company on their bottom line. Cancer Capital has these big companies treating their employees as companies waiting to be spun out, rather than as careers or team leaders they can nurture. And none of that has anything to do with building products, serving customers, taking care of employees, or creating businesses that last.

That’s what I mean when I say this isn’t venture capital anymore. The word “seed” used to describe a stage in a company’s life. Now it describes a relationship between an investor and somebody’s résumé. The language that is being used still consists of the same words that were used half a century ago. It just doesn't mean any of the same things. And it's not how the things around us that have lasted the longest were built.

Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies. Now, what I mean here are people who have a great idea for a product or a service, and who want to get it out to the world in order to make something amazing happen. (These days there's also a cohort of people who call themselves "founders", but who basically just identified a pile of money that they wanted to grab, and decided that they were willing to suck up to whatever investors they had to in order to get that pile of money. Let's file these horrid people away for later — we'll come back to them.)

The deal for founders used to be pretty straightforward. You'd have an idea you were obsessed with, you would build it out as far as you could with whatever resources you were able to scrape together yourself, or with the help of your friends and family, and then if you absolutely had to have more money to make your idea succeed, you might seek out some investors to help you get to the next level. The conventional wisdom was that investors were a bunch of predators (everyone called them "vulture capital", often to their faces), and that founders should go in extremely skeptical about them, but at times they were a necessary evil in order to achieve one's goal.

What about the investors?

On the other side of the table, investors knew the deal, and the best of them understood their role within the ecosystem. Here in New York City, we had influential firms like Union Square Ventures priding themselves on how founder-friendly they could be, both by trying to be straightforward in their communication with founders and by having an understandable thesis for their investments, which would let founders anticipate whether their company would be of interest or not. This avoided wasting time on the part of both founders and investors.

There was also a norm with real teeth, because it actually cost firms money: a VC would generally refuse to invest in a company that competed with one of their existing portfolio companies. Not as a favor, but because the conflict was obvious to everybody involved — you can't sit on two boards in the same market and be honest with either of them, and you can't ask a founder to open their books to somebody who's already funding their rival. Firms would tell you up front that they were out because of a conflict, and that early no was understood to be the professional thing to do. Part of why a legible thesis mattered so much is that it let you find those conflicts before you'd spent three months preparing a pitch.

By the time I pitched a company to Bloomberg Beta here in New York in 2013, they had published their operating manual on GitHub in order to be more transparent to founders — and they let us publish our term sheet on GitHub as well, for the same reason.

After the Good Old Days

I share all this history to give some sense of how, as recently as a dozen years ago, venture capital firms were striving to compete by showing how founder-friendly they could be, and in the following years many even made a lot of noise about how inclusive they wanted their portfolios to be, inviting underrepresented founders in to pitch. (To their credit, many of the most prominent investors in our NYC tech community have not succumbed to the Cancer Capital values yet, though it has meant that they're stuck as smaller players in deals where those giant firms dominate.)

In recent years, though, the mask has fully come off for the giant firms, and even many smaller firms that are aligned with their agenda. It's not merely that they've adopted extremist political positions — though they have — it's that they now regularly collude against founders.

That's going to sound shocking to people who haven't been involved in pitching these firms. But I'll say it again, and then I'll explain how it works: major venture capital firms now routinely collude against founders, which means those founders end up with worse terms for their deals.

Stacking the deck

Founders who are aggressive and enthusiastic about their companies will try to pitch a range of firms on the merits of their startup, often coming in with a well-polished pitch deck and presentation, sometimes tailoring each pitch to the specific preferences that they've researched about that firm or partner. It can take months and months of preparation to get ready for these meetings, and they're often among the most stressful and high-stakes meetings of a founder's career. I've helped many founders prepare for these meetings, and have seen folks break into tears or wake up with panic attacks ahead of them — people take them extremely seriously. (I never got stressed about these pitches, but I have a fairly atypical attitude about VCs and their firms.)

A bit of important context here: for decades, VCs have said that they don't sign NDAs. Decent guys like Brad Feld, Mark Suster and Fred Wilson wrote their blog posts about this many years ago back in the early days of VC blogging, because it would have added a bit of absurd overhead to ordinary conversations, and they genuinely wouldn't have entertained investing in competitive companies within the same portfolio. But a once-benign policy takes on pretty sinister implications in today's environment.

So look at what the actual arrangement is now. You are expected to hand over a complete financial model, your customer pipeline, a product roadmap, probably your unit economics or cost of go-to-market, and some version of an assessment of where you're weakest or how you stack up to your competitors — to a group of people who have explicitly refused to keep it confidential. And they declined before you walked in the room, as a condition for you getting to pitch them at all. They're exploiting the power imbalance from the start, in a way that no other industry considers normal.

Which brings us to the peculiar thing that I've seen happen to a number of founders who went through the process of pitching multiple investors: they would commonly find that the partner they were speaking to could speak with some familiarity and fluency about the details of their businesses, even before they'd gotten to that part of the presentation. Sometimes, the partner would openly say, "I was talking to [X] over at [other venture firm], and he thinks this is really interesting." It would almost always be when they were saying something positive (at least superficially), but they would routinely reveal that they had spoken to other investors, at other firms, about a company that was pitching them.

This was a casual point that came up in conversation! A few times, investors would even say it like it was a service they were rendering for the founder: "We were thinking we might team up with that other firm and we'll go in together on your next round."

Here's the issue with that kindly offer: it's colluding against the founder! I couldn't tell if the investors didn't know, or didn't care that they were admitting to working together with the other venture capital firms to discuss the proprietary, confidential details of a company that they hadn't even invested in. And all of this was happening years ago, before they had extremely advanced AI tools to help them analyze the details of the company data for startups that they were considering investing in.

To draw an important distinction here: syndication during a funding round is normal. Firms routinely co-invest, with rounds filled by multiple investors. As founders, we frequently want two or more firms to come in together to reach the desired amount of capital we're trying to raise. But that's not the phenomenon I'm describing. Syndication happens after a firm has consent, in collaboration with the startup's founders and executives. What happens in these meetings is a different thing entirely: firms that have not committed, may never commit, and in many cases are about to pass on your startup entirely, are comparing (confidential!) notes on your business while you're still in the middle of pitching them.

One of the most striking parts of this collusion is, from a legal and market standpoint, these venture firms are supposed to be competitors! I noticed this twenty years ago, back when it was merely funny: VCs are as obsessed with what the other guy is doing as anybody in fashion or entertainment. If you ask regulators or lawmakers, they would likely insist that venture capital is a healthy market where there is lots of thriving competition. But if you're a small startup trying to get funded, it can look a lot more like the entire industry is just one big company with a lot of little branches that operate under different names. (Back when regulators still pursued this stuff, the DOJ quietly pushed a dozen directors off nine company boards because the way they were intertwined was against the law, mostly at private equity firms. But that's the board-level version of the problem. Nobody's looking at the pitch meeting.)

Cancer Capital colludes against you

So we've seen how VC firms would team up against founders, even before the rise of the hyper-scale Cancer Capital firms. But how has it gotten worse since they took over? Well, there are a few ways.

The first is pretty straightforward: Pretty much everybody feels like they have to pitch the mega-firms, at some point. If it's not in the initial round of funding, then certainly by the time a company has reached a valuation of about $100M or so, they will have been expected to pitch one of the small handful of Cancer Capital funds, and it would be considered a glaring negative signal if they hadn't at least gotten one of them to sign on as an investor.

What's more, since they will have had to pitch all of the mega-firms in order to get to that level, all of those firms will now have gotten a full overview of the entire business plan and financial details of that startup (since that's a core part of the pitch) — as well as every one of their competitors, since all those companies had to pitch the same firms, too. And remember: not one of those firms signed anything.

The second way is that the conflict rule is simply gone. Firms now routinely take pitches from companies that directly compete with each other, and will invest in more than one, or even several of them. In the hottest categories it's just described as their strategy — they're taking a position on the category rather than simply investing in a company.

Think about what that does to the information problem. It's one thing for a firm to have every competitor's pitch deck. It's another for them to have every competitor's deck and board seats or information rights for multiple companies in the space. (Information rights include actual monthly numbers, real churn, staffing plans and compensation, and much more sensitive data that wouldn't be included in a pitch.) At that point the extractive VCs aren't just investing in the market — they're the only party that can see it. Not even regulators have access to this breadth of data.

Where that leaves the market is that the Cancer Capital firms often have nearly complete information about a nascent market, acting as an information tollgate that every startup has to pass through at a certain scale. They suck in the pitch decks from every player in a market, and sometimes far more data than that, all without an obligation to invest in any of them.

And it gets worse.

Because these firms are committed to their ideological agendas, if they do see an idea they like, but they don't like the morals of the founder who pitched it (i.e. the founder has morals), they could elect to merely choose someone in their network to create a clone of the idea, and then hyper-fund that clone in order to kill the company that just pitched them. If that sounds awful to you, imagine how it feels to the multiple founders that this has happened to over the years. I've heard about it firsthand, though nobody will go on the record, because they are convinced it would be the end of their careers. The receipts I've seen make me 100% convinced, though.

And this is where those horrid money-chasing fake founders come back into the story. It's not just that the industry tolerates them. It's that an industry shaped by Cancer Capital now produces them. If you're a firm choosing between an obsessive builder who's got a clear vision for what they want in the world, and is going to fight you on terms, or a sycophant who'll take whatever you offer and execute the ideas laid out in the manifesto on your fund's homepage, the second one is the obvious choice. And there's no shortage of folks in that second category.

The Cancer Capital firms are now operating with something like X-ray vision over entire markets, being fed detailed information on emerging spaces by founders who are effectively coerced into handing over all of their most sensitive business data.

Meanwhile the other 99% of venture capital firms, who are still operating in the old world, are at a massive disadvantage, because their "deal flow" (the number of startups that come to pitch them on investing) is more constrained as they don't have the name recognition or coercive power that the hyper-scale firms do. The network effects are a lot like social media platforms — the giant ones are toxic, but a lot of people go there because they feel like everybody else is there. This isn't coincidence; the guys running the Cancer Capital firms made a huge part of their fortunes by investing in the biggest, worst social networking platforms.

Any way out?

It's easy to see the way the deck is stacked and to feel a sense of despair if you're trying to build a business or a product. But there are lots of ways out. The first few here are about staying out of the trap in the first place; the last two are about going after the trap itself. No individual action can solve a systemic problem, but all of these tactics together can begin to change these systems.

• Bootstrap. First, there's a big reason that the conventional wisdom in the early days of the web was to caution against ever taking venture capital funding: you often don't need it! As I noted in my last piece, legendary companies like Microsoft and Apple got to the launch of their earliest milestone products without any VC dollars, and your business will be more robust and resilient for having gotten on its feet without taking on those burdens. Put simply: Live within your means, don't raise VC.

• Build more efficiently. Many startups are finding that contemporary tools (for some, including LLMs) are letting them build products and go to market much more efficiently than before, obviating the need for raising giant amounts of money just to get something launched. By staying lean and remaining closely connected to a community that can support you, you eliminate the need to rely on outside funding. Open source and open communities can be a superpower here.

• Leak-proof the deck. If you're going to pitch anyway, pitch like everything in your deck is going to end up in front of your competitors, because there's a decent chance that it will. Founders often get coached to be exhaustive with every detailed number, every roadmap item, every honest weakness, but that's advice that only made sense when you could trust the people across the table. Give them only what they need in order to make a decision, and then hold the rest for later meetings once there's an actual commitment. Or: build your business to be fully transparent, where there are no secrets, and you don't have to worry about anything leaking, and there isn't any advantage to them having access to the data. Either way: protect yourself. And always, always compare notes with other founders. The VCs are already comparing notes about you. (I have a lot more advice about pitching VCs, but that's an entire other series of posts.)

• Other VCs. Finaly, one last investor option: work with the more conventional VC firms. This remains technically possible, albeit dangerous. There are many firms in the "99%" of the venture world that haven't fully embraced the toxicity of the Cancer Capital funds. Earlier I gave credit to the folks in our NYC tech community who've held the line, and I meant it — but their decency can't protect you from the structure they're operating inside. The challenge is, even though these may be run by thoughtful or decent people, if your company succeeds, you may well end up having to do a follow-on round of funding, and that increases the likelihood that you will have to do business with one of the bad actors. Plenty of folks are trying this path, but I would caution against it.

• Push for regulation. This option is hard at the federal level in the United States, due to the level of corruption under an authoritarian regime, but some limited wins, especially at state or local levels, may be possible. In the longer run, this has been the only mechanism that has truly held these kinds of abuses in check during prior historical precedents. Some state regulators may be willing to enforce rules against the worst behaviors that violate anticompetitive or anti-collusion laws.

• Encourage limited partners to divest. Many of the Cancer Capital firms rely on funds from sources like public retirement funds which often still have responsible investment commitments. These may still offer some possibility of accountability or leverage which could be used to get them to divest from these firms, and put some pressure on others to discourage them from enabling these kinds of bad behaviors.

Right from the day of the attacks, that evening, I remember people all around the world saying to us, “Today, we are all New Yorkers.” It was so earnest, a statement so sincere, that I am still surprised how much it moved me. It might be hard for folks to imagine now, but it felt so real, that people everywhere — including people across America — felt like they loved us in New York City, and they were grieving with us, and cared about us.

And now we’re here in 2026, where it’s been wondrous to watch the world, for the first time since then, tell us once again that… their hearts are with New York City. This time, not in grief, but in joyous celebration. Celebration of our victories: Knicks in five! The Liberty and Gotham FC were champs less than two weeks after that! The World Cup lit the city up! Hip hop fans in the city came together for career-cappers by Wu-Tang and Jay Z. Countless festivals popped off, parades were more alive than ever, and nearly every one of those festivals and parades featured a shout-out to, or appearance from our wildly popular mayor Zohran Mamdani.

There are so many more highlights of how our city is serving us: the rollout of universal child care for 2-K, expansion of school safety zones to slow traffic for our kids, fixing up playgrounds, tickets for kids to go to Broadway and regular folks to go to the U.S. Open, repairing the BQE, $100 million in tips rightfully going to delivery workers, simplified paperwork for small businesses, the launch of the offices of Deed Theft Prevention, Insurance Affordability, Worker Power, and lots more.

The city is the safest it’s been in the 400 years since Europeans arrived.

And every single one of these triumphs, greeted by our friends and supporters around the world cheering for the progress our city is making, encouraging our successes. Rooting for us like they were 25 years ago, happy for us in good times, not just in our sorrow.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s showing how we can lead by our example: with compassion and care for one another, with open hearts and an abiding desire to lift one another up. It’s the same impulse I saw in abundance on the afternoon of 9/11. I have said many times that the afternoon after those attacks was one of the most beautiful displays of humanity I’ve ever seen, with strangers caring for each other on the sidewalks and in the streets; the spontaneous hugs between strangers in the street after the Knicks clinched the championship was a mirror of that feeling, with communal love being openly expressed, but without needing profound grief to catalyze it.

I’ve seen New York show its heart openly a number of times in the years since the attacks: The blackout in 2003, after Hurricane Sandy, that first cruel wave of Covid. But all of those were born of struggle and pain. Today, we still have folks greeting each other with “Knicks in five!” Something has changed.

The Great Rebuilding

I point out all this joy because it’s important to understand what it represents. As I’d pointed out last year, the abandonment of our principles in America, our embrace of authoritarianism, our discarding of the rule of law — these represent a victory for those who sought to attack us that day. They validated so many of the critiques they leveled about the American empire and the American way, even if they could never justify the hatred or bigotry of their ideology, or the cruelty and senselessness of their attacks.

We gave them a win when we turned to fascism, and for a long time that made me despair.

But I knew that there is so much good in us, because I’d seen it in this city, and I knew that the solution would lie in rebuilding. Not just in a physical rebuilding, like the kind that so many focused on in the days and year after the attacks (I was so sick of hearing those who didn’t give a damn about our neighborhoods talk about “build the towers back exactly as they were!”, without regard for whether that was actually good for the community), but a deeper communal and cultural rebuilding. The sort of thing a caring heart might describe as replacing “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”.

Many wonder how, or if, the United States will find its way out of authoritarianism. The only possible way is if people are joyfully running towards a better option, not fearfully backing away from the worst of what they face today.

That’s a fragile hope. But it is a hope. And the moment we are having in New York City right now gives so many a chance to see exactly what a possible future looks like. We’re not just happy about a good mayor who makes fun social media, or a winning basketball team, or the lowest crime ever. We’re not merely celebrating the economic revitalization of a neighborhood that survived an unimaginable attack. We’re not simply repeating the same pizza-and-bagels platitudes.

We are joyfully, purposefully building a future together here, where we lift each other up, and celebrate each other. We’re caring for those who are lost, or afraid, or vulnerable. And then we’re caring for those who care for them. We’re not reciting platitudes about how our diversity makes us better; we’re just living our diversity and letting the dividend speak for itself.

I Love New York

This isn’t just another excuse for me to say “I love New York, it’s the greatest city in the world”, although it’s also that. It’s a bit of a paternal embrace to the young man I was back on the day of those attacks, too. I’m reaching back half a lifetime ago for me, now, with less than half of my life left. And I can see the turning point. On the day, I said, “today’s the day when everything changed”, but I didn’t know how right I was at a personal level. In just the few weeks and months that followed, I met my wife, embraced a new group of friends who would define my social circle for the years to come, and committed to building the purpose and life that I still live.

In many ways, my life started that day, and it’s part of why I have such a deep and abiding love for this city. Just a few weeks ago, I was at an event where someone asked why I’ve served on the board of a community organization for many years, and without thinking, my immediate response was, “Because this place saved my life.” I’d never articulated it that way before, and didn’t think about my answer before I said it, but it felt like the most obvious thing in the world.

It’s just true. When you see what community, real community looks like, it heals you and inspires you. Of course New York City doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on that. But the combination of our communities with our outsized global impact has a resonance far beyond these few islands.

The signs are still there

In the days just after the attacks, every flat surface around Manhattan was plastered with MISSING posters showing images of those lost. For a few days, there had still been hope of recovering survivors. After it became obvious that there weren’t going to be any more rescues, many places began putting up an updated version of Milton Glaser’s famous “I Love NY” logo, now appended to say “More Than Ever”. These posters took their place next to, or sometimes in place of, the “missing” posters.

Every once in a while, I’ll go into a bodega or a coffee shop, especially downtown, and I’ll still see a faded “More Than Ever” poster up in the window. What’s strange is, it doesn’t instantly take me back to that time.

It keeps me right here. Joyfully looking toward what’s next.

In Previous Years

Last year, 24 is After the Fall:

Despite all this, New York City is still the New York that permanently became a part of my heart that day. We will embrace the young Muslim man who will, inshallah, be our mayor soon. We will hold the line on remembering that day as it actually was, and caring for each other now as we did then. If Manhattan has to be a figurative island as much as a literal one, then that’s what it was always born to be.

Two years ago, 23: What was 9/11?:

The majority of people in the world were either not born, or not old enough to be aware of what was going on, and then many who would recall are either gone or their memories have faded. But I was in New York City on September 11, 2001, and I can say definitively: The constructed cultural narrative around the day bears almost no resemblance to the actual lived experience of anyone I know who was here that day. So maybe it’s worth telling a little bit of what I actually saw.

Three years ago, "It's unrecognizable":

[M]aybe I keep coming back because I am hoping that others might still recognize the little glimpses of humanity that I saw on the day of the attacks, and that I saw in abundance, in New York City, in the days that follow. It wasn't a myth, it wasn't just wishful thinking, there really was kindness and care in this place that I love so much. I don't think those who tell the loudest stories today would even recognize it.

Four years ago, "There Is Nothing To Remember"

So it's clear that the events of that day have fully passed into myth, useful only as rhetoric in a culture war, or as justifications for violence. Nothing epitomizes this more than the fact that, while the memory has faded in culture broadly, it's only brought to the fore in situations like those where most New Yorkers would be targeted.

Five years ago, "Twenty is a Myth":

I can't change how society overall sees this event. To my eternal regret, I couldn't change how we responded in any meaningful way. But I did get to make personal changes, permanently and for the better, and the loss and grief of that day does still motivate me to try to honor the moment by pushing for justice, and care, and an earnest engagement with the world.

Six years ago, Nineteen is When They Forgot

I do have the experience of having seen this city bounce back from unimaginable pain before. I have seen us respond to attacks on our public life by rebuilding and reimagining public space. I have seen us grieve our losses and rally behind those who cared for those injured, and preserve space in our cultural memory for their pain and sacrifice. By no means have we done enough for all those lost, but it is absolutely true that we can rebuild. We’ve done it before.

Seven years ago, Eighteen is History

There are ritualized remembrances, largely led by those who weren't  there, those who mostly hate the values that New York City embodies. The  sharpest memories are of the goals of those who masterminded the  attacks. It's easy enough to remember what they wanted, since they  accomplished all their objectives and we live in the world they sought  to create. The empire has been permanently diminished. Never Forget.

In 2018, Seventeen is (Almost) Just Another Day

I spent so many years thinking “I can’t go there” that it caught me completely off guard to realize that going there is now routine. Maybe the most charitable way to look at it is resiliency, or that I’m seeing things through the eyes of my child who’s never known any reality but the present one. I'd spent a lot of time wishing that we hadn't been so overwhelmed with response to that day, so much that I hadn''t considered what it would be like when the day passed for so many people with barely a notice at all.

In 2017, Sixteen is Letting Go Again

So, like ten years ago, I’m letting go. Trying not to project my feelings onto this anniversary, just quietly remembering that morning and how it felt. My son asked me a couple of months ago, “I heard there was another World Trade Center before this one?” and I had to find a version of the story that I could share with him. In this telling, losing those towers was unimaginably sad and showed that there are incredibly hurtful people in the world, but there are still so many good people, and they can make wonderful things together.

In 2016 Fifteen is the Past:

I don’t dismiss or deny that so much has gone so wrong in the response and the reaction that our culture has had since the attacks, but I will not forget or diminish the pure openheartedness I witnessed that day. And I will not let the cynicism or paranoia of others draw me in to join them.

What I’ve realized, simply, is that 9/11 is in the past now.

In 2015, Fourteen is Remembering:

For the first time, I clearly felt like I had put the attacks firmly in the past. They have loosened their grip on me. I don’t avoid going downtown, or take circuitous routes to avoid seeing where the towers once stood. I can even imagine deliberately visiting the area to see the new train station.

In 2014, Thirteen is Understanding:

There’s no part of that day that one should ever have to explain to a child, but I realized for the first time this year that, when the time comes, I’ll be ready. Enough time has passed that I could recite the facts, without simply dissolving into a puddle of my own unresolved questions. I look back at past years, at my own observances of this anniversary, and see how I veered from crushingly sad to fiercely angry to tentatively optimistic, and in each of those moments I was living in one part of what I felt. Maybe I’m ready to see this thing in a bigger picture, or at least from a perspective outside of just myself.

From 2013, Twelve is Trying:

I thought in 2001 that some beautiful things could come out of that worst of days, and sure enough, that optimism has often been rewarded. There are boundless examples of kindness and generosity in the worst of circumstances that justify the hope I had for people’s basic decency back then, even if initially my hope was based only on faith and not fact.

But there is also fatigue. The inevitable fading of outrage and emotional devastation into an overworked rhetorical reference point leaves me exhausted. The decay of a brief, profound moment of unity and reflection into a cheap device to be used to prop up arguments about the ordinary, the everyday and the mundane makes me weary. I’m tired from the effort to protect the fragile memory of something horrific and hopeful that taught me about people at their very best and at their very, very worst.

In 2012, Eleven is What We Make:

These are the gifts our children, or all children, give us every day in a million different ways. But they’re also the gifts we give ourselves when we make something meaningful and beautiful. The new World Trade Center buildings are beautiful, in a way that the old ones never were, and in a way that’ll make our fretting over their exorbitant cost seem short-sighted in the decades to come. More importantly, they exist. We made them, together. We raised them in the past eleven years just as surely as we’ve raised our children, with squabbles and mistakes and false starts and slow, inexorable progress toward something beautiful.

In 2011 for the 10th anniversary, Ten is Love and Everything After:

I don’t have any profound insights or political commentary to offer that others haven’t already articulated first and better. All that I have is my experience of knowing what it mean to be in New York City then. And from that experience, the biggest lesson I have taken is that I have the obligation to be a kinder man, a more thoughtful man, and someone who lives with as much passion and sincerity as possible. Those are the lessons that I’ll tell my son some day in the distant future, and they’re the ones I want to remember now.

In 2010, Nine is New New York:

[T]his is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City. Over the four hundred years it’s taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there’s never been a better time to walk down the street. Crime is low, without us having sacrificed our personality or passion to get there. We’ve invested in making our sidewalks more walkable, our streets more accommodating of the bikes and buses and taxis that convey us around our town. There’s never been a more vibrant scene in the arts, music or fashion here. And in less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world.

And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks.

In 2009, Eight Is Starting Over:

[T]his year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we’ve been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I’ve been trying of late to do exactly that. And I’ve had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day.

Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you’ll pardon the geeky reference, it’s as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch, most of the people I’m closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don’t think it’s coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life’s work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.

In 2008, Seven Is Angry:

Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don’t see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I’m not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there’s a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you’re addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother’s name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001.

In 2007, Six Is Letting Go:

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn’t only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we’d put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I’m most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I’d turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I’d be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.

In 2006, After Five Years, Failure:

[O]ne of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it’s become cliché now, there’s simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature.

We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.

In 2005, Four Years:

I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn’t care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn’t honor the people who were actually going through the event.

In 2004, Thinking Of You:

I don’t know if it’s distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There’s a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that “this is all going to be political debates someday” and, well, someday’s already here.

In 2003, Two Years:

I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I’ve been so protective, I didn’t want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella’s Castle or something. I’m trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I’m lucky to have.

In 2002, I wrote On Being An American:

[I]n those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.

In 2001, Thank You:

I am physically fine, as are all my family members and immediate friends. I’ve been watching the footage all morning, I can’t believe I watched the World Trade Center collapse…

I’ve been sitting here this whole morning, choking back tears… this is just too much, too big. I can see the smoke and ash from the street here. I have friends of friends who work there, I was just there myself the day before yesterday. I can’t process this all. I don’t want to.

1. Launch a new product or feature that very obviously violates people’s privacy or consent. (This one, you’re probably familiar with; they do this constantly, and sometimes it even makes headlines.)
2. Get caught, either by users or by tech experts or researchers who find out Meta has been doing this nefarious thing.
3. Put out a press release announcing that Meta will be pausing this practice, while explaining how it wasn’t really that bad.
4. Wait a little while until everybody is paying attention to something else, or the next scandal has popped up.
5. Launch the product or feature again, and steal everybody’s data or surveil everybody’s behavior without their consent or respect for their privacy.

Of course, by the time the transgressive technology comes back around, everyone has moved on to the next terrible thing, and the company gets away with the thing that had everyone up in arms in the first place. Within the company, this is taken as proof that it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with: “See? They were complaining about nothing!” It’s a part of the “inevitability” strategy that so much of Silicon Valley has been using for years, where treating new technologies as if they were inexorable parts of nature is a tactic for getting every part of society to go along with their most extreme plans.

Much of this relies on people having short attention spans, on institutions that don’t hold these big companies accountable, and on the coercive power that big platforms like Meta’s have over people’s lives (they effectively make it impossible for most people to opt out without facing dire social consequences).

It’s especially important to identify these patterns because the alumni of these companies bring these toxic behaviors with them when they go on to their subsequent roles. It’s no coincidence, for example, that so many former Facebook product managers work at OpenAI and that ChatGPT has run the same playbook in terms of abusing people’s privacy and trust.

While we don’t have an immediate solution for this broken behavior, at least for the foreseeable future, what we can do is identify these patterns and name them, and call them out when we see them repeat. See if you can’t identify some examples yourself, both from the past and perhaps some that are happening right now.

Throwbacks:

• Facebook makes it official: You have no say (2012)
• My Wired column capturing the moment their Terms of Service became abusive (2012)
• The Facebook Reckoning (2010)

This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words.

This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.

And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.

To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics.

But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm.

The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.

You Were Not Born With These Constraints

One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that.

The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google.

Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants.

Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.)

Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they?

Fuck the Algorithm

Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.

The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!”

Okay, what if they do? What if they do.

Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates.

(And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.)

If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)

If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.

It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”.

The response is simple:

• For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits.
• Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find.
• Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities.
• Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored.
• Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.)
• If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest.
• Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same.

If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.

I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.