There are all kinds of slop. AI-generated images that mimic art made by hand or by camera or by wrestling some other instrument into submission. One-shotted essays that mimic thought. The flurry of Substack Posts from never-before-writers and Twitter Articles crowned genius before anyone checks if they’re human. Slop is the merch that makes a mockery of the references it embeds and the choices it didn’t make. Slop is stealing cultural symbols and cool aesthetics to call itself tasteful—or tasteslop. Slop is a song with a sick beat and no meaning. With lyrics that do not yearn nor mourn nor show me the soul of anyone forlorn. Slop is the absence of decisions and, more critically, discernment. Slop is legacy IP with little else. Slop is Netflix movies you mark as read. Slop is the tale you tell someone else to live by just to validate yours. Founder slop says it’s 996 or never succeed—grindslop. Slop is calling boring brilliant. It is every podcaster on a mission to make every guest’s every soundbite make you quote it—profoundslop. I’m not scared to say most short-form video is straight slop. And slop leaves nothing but quease. But I’m not saying slop doesn’t work.

Smart slop is effective on the defenseless and dopamine-drugged. Slop is the tool of soft-crime grifters. Slop makes number go up while aura goes down. Slop is taking a beating right now, as if we just invented it, yet it was always there. Bad work isn’t immoral but faking the struggle is. Slop is where badness and dishonesty meet. One can be enough. Slop is excess pitched to us as appetite. Slop is calling me stupid. Now the gloves are off and everyone carries needle and thread. Slop! is the new scarlet letter. The threats have started: soon nobody will know what’s slop. But there are hunters among us whose life’s mission it is to know. Neighborhood watch has found a new cause. Slop is what makes parents say you’re only cheating yourself. Slop is what makes Sam Kriss promise to unalive you.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and we sell stories in order to eat; slop is when it becomes impossible to believe them. We aren’t becoming literary critics or film critics or design critics or lifestyle critics. We’re becoming story critics. What is slop? Slop is not a medium. Slop is a body severed from its soul. Slop is a narrative lie. Slop doesn’t think it’s telling you a story; it thinks it’s just showing you the world you want to see. But it tells you a story all the same—and Slop is a bad story. It is a story I do not believe, because its face is so fake or because I just know too much to be fooled. Slop is a bad story because the characters are just plot device and set design. It is a story too hollow and too literal to make anyone think before their eyes start to close or start to roll. Slop is a bad story, and it is that much worse because you were so clearly not the one meant to tell it.

Please tell a good one.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and perennial thank you to my patrons. If you enjoyed this short essay, share with a friend or community here or on X. DMs welcome.

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In Silicon Valley, “new media” has become shorthand for the post-pandemic revival of a certain kind of tech media (not the McLuhan lineage original new media). This new media has grown up alongside a distribution strategy: bypass gatekeepers, go direct, and own your audience. Anyone can build an audience and those who build one can (and have) become powerful intermediaries in their own right. So disintermediation is one story, but not the entire thing.

As platforms mature, power laws steepen. Sure everyone can publish now, but most of it has no impact. Attention is scarce, but high-value attention is scarcer. It turns out a small audience of the right people beats a massive audience of the wrong ones. In Silicon Valley, the most valuable audience is inside.

1. NEW MEDIA IS INSIDER MEDIA.

2. Insider Media is media for insiders, by insiders. Both creator and audience belong to the same in-group. The public gets to be in the room but is never the audience being catered to. The topic is less important than the audience whose opinion matters. It’s a closed-room broadcast where principals talk to principals while fans, aspirants, and adjacents watch, learn, and report out.

3. Insider Media is the opposite of journalistic media—outsider media—made for outsiders by outsiders. Outsiders will call Insider Media an echo chamber or bubble, but the proximity is very much the product. This tension is inevitable in any world where status compounds and access is currency. (Note, insiders making media for outsiders is the oldest flavor of commercial media—traditional marketing, even if via modern channels.)

   

   

4. INSIDER AUDIENCES ARE MORE VALUABLE THAN THEIR SIZE. A show with 50,000 highly valued viewers may matter more than one with five million random ones. Friends have mentioned the similarity to Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” but this model isn’t about direct patronage; in that way, this wave blends old and new worlds. ROI is less important than the audience roster and your mutuals. Audience Market Cap is the metric that matters.

   

5. The average person who starts a podcast wants to take a shot at building an audience (of mostly strangers), making some money, and maybe becoming famous. The tech insider who starts a podcast for tech insiders wants something more distinct: a respectable way to meet people they respect, deeper participation in their social and intellectual circles, and leverage for future opportunities in their field (and if fame, money, and status happen to arrive along the way and push them to go all-in, great).

6. Every media property has a combination of status, entertainment, and utility (inspired by Eugene Wei.) These axes are scalable—more of each is mostly better. Prestige is different. It depends on restraint and rewards selection.

7. PRESTIGE IS PERCEIVED TASTE LEGITIMACY. Prestige is earned through taste discipline and operates on a curve: past the taste optimum, more is bad. It becomes tryhard, tacky, or tasteslop. Prestige emerges when a group believes someone consistently demonstrates superior judgment.

8. PRESTIGE EARNS STATUS, BUT IS NOT REDUCIBLE TO STATUS. Status comes from the position and influence of cast, collaborators, consumers, and tastemakers. Prestige can be earned in more ways and in a more meritocratic sense than status, whether on the basis of “taste” as aesthetic or intellectual rigor (the likes of SemiAnalysis and The Dwarkesh Podcast come up often for the latter).

9. Stripe Press is a beloved expression of taste discipline. Each book is produced as a timeless artifact and arrives slowly and quietly. Thrive Capital is the model of restraint: almost no media output and all prestige calibrated. The All-In podcast is the inverse: the cast is high status, but the personas and production aren’t strictly taste-disciplined.

10. IN THE INSIDER MEDIA GAME, PRESTIGE IS THE COVETED LANE.

11. Founders Fund just launched a show where tech-famous founders and investors play Mafia, with parallels to Celebrity Traitors. It’s the most Prestige Insider Media entry since TBPN (whose deserved arc has made people take tech shows seriously). Tech Twitter certified Mafia as good. So far, I agree.

12. Still, I have notes. The more the players have real-world reputation, the more careful they are in victory and defeat. The show works if it still creates opportunities for character revelation and weakens if the premise is too focal or the cast becomes too self-conscious. It needs more parlor talk (intro bar scene), lounge clips, confessionals, and parasocial continuity while ideally the cast rotates. Else there’s a good chance we get bored and just want the cast’s thoughts on the current things.

13. INSIDER PRESTIGE PUNCHES ABOVE ITS WEIGHT. TBPN's Hollywood embrace is this unfolding. A show translating tech for everyone would have been too generic for this audience; leaning into the inside is the prestige track to crossing over. Make the thing the insiders can’t miss, and there’s a good chance outsiders follow. A related maxim I hold on to: “The most personal is the most creative”—Martin Scorsese via Bong Joon Ho.

    

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14. INSIDER MEDIA ALWAYS HAS A STORY AND A META-STORY. The content is one story. It comes with parasocial intimacy with the characters. The people making it are another story. The meta-game they’re playing and game-state visibility into the room is the second draw. Insider Media is so fun and addictive because of these dual stories—a dynamic we’ve seen with TBPN and with the Substack Feed Me among the NYC business-media-creative class (and in a case study I know too well: Clubhouse’s early rise).

15. Much of the energy around the Mafia launch is about the meta-story. With high-powered real-world figures as the cast, the fun becomes personality profiling, sentiment analysis, and corporate recon. It’s off-script access to people you might invest in, work for, or compete against. Discussing VC branding, power rankings, and the whole meta-game that Founders Fund and Mike Solana are playing is at least half the insider fun.

16. THE POST BECAME THE PODCAST, AND THE PODCAST WILL CEDE GROUND TO THE SHOW. “Building in public” was once the insider play. But there’s a tradeoff between perma-dripping raw updates and saving it all for big moments. And with all the noise, you now need slick narrative and polish on top of the raw footage (and as I’ll repeat, the pendulum always swings).

17. The demand for character revelation impacts the format. The podcast and interview talk show has a built-in problem: the guest knows they’re being interviewed. They tell flattering stories they’ve told a hundred times. Hosts lob softballs to protect access. Insider’s subjects become their relationships. No shock Insider Media skews sycophantic (though there’s real opportunity for the charming bull to challenge the narrative more). Overcompensation manifests via performative profundity: lowered voice, engineered pause, mmms and mmmhmms of poignancy, “say more.” People may not call it out but it’s felt.

18. Premise-driven shows are up. Aspirationally, they give you character revelation through the freeing nature of constraints. Then there are the insider profiles in the style of legacy prestige magazines. Colossus is the new standard-bearer (and the magazine quality cover shots are more important than you think). SF Alexandria, New Ontologies, Early Days are upstarts. These skew sycophantic too but with license to narrate more character complexity.

19. NOVELTY CAN’T BE COPIED BECAUSE IT EMERGES FROM FIT. There are calls across Tech Twitter to clone popular formats for tech (Hot Ones, Shark Tank, MTV Cribs, etc). My strong opinion: Format-recasts fall flat, and rarely win. TBPN gets called ESPN for tech, but that’s just aesthetic observation. Mafia mimics Traitors, but it’s more about the fit with tech.

20. I see so many technically competent Insider Media projects with expensive sets, high production value, and popular formats that are still culturally dead. There is no substitute for being top 0.01% great at something highly visible. It’s best if your edge is a quality of the people, not the production. I say casting is everything because the secret sauce is always the characters.

21. The easiest thing to copy is “format.” Subway Takes is a good example of format superiority, but the novelty comes from the fit between Kareem, New York, the guests, the quirks, and the show’s constraints. Status and celebrity can draw audiences at first. But a true hit requires the creator, cast, format, premise, and moment to reinforce each other. Novelty emerges from fit (and fun).

22. CAPITAL IS INCREASINGLY TABLE STAKES, BUT CULTURAL POSITION ISN’T. Every venture capital firm wants to punch above its weight as talent, capital, and attention concentrate into fewer hands. Tech has never led culture in the broad sense, but it’s paying more attention to its culture and cultural power. Every conversation I’ve had with VCs of late has found its way to narrative and storytelling. We’re in the era of venture capital as war between media teams, each with their own ideology and aesthetic, and house style of newly minted creative roles. Credit where due: A16Z reclaimed “new media” and made the coinage stick, despite the memetic flack. I quite like Alex Danco’s articulation of the role firms play in providing legitimacy.

23. Insider Media helps institutions that are smaller than their rivals become culturally larger than them. Prestige Insider Media is powerful because it converts judgment into influence—and judgment is independent of scale.

24. FEW INSTITUTIONS HAVE TO PLAY THE INSIDER AND OUTSIDER GAME SIMULTANEOUSLY AND AT SCALE AS VISIBLY AS AI LABS DO. AI labs are competing for belief as much as customers. AI itself is an inherently hard protagonist to root for. It’s abstract, threatening, fast-moving, and ultimately inhuman. The frontier AI labs’ products and people need to be inside-the-room coveted and outside-the-room trusted. The jobs-narrative whiplash—AI will take all the jobs, then it won’t—is the insider/outsider narrative tension showing its seams as AI diffuses along the adoption curve. It is a fascinating challenge, and fascinating to watch. There is nowhere else such high leverage narrative experimentation is happening so fast right now.

25. And hence—the TBPN/OpenAI deal made so much sense because TBPN has become the rare Insider Media property with perfectly cast human hosts and intense cultural gravity. True rarity is having such standing in both worlds. Expect to see more poaching of unicorns with insider-outsider leverage. (I wrote on the Riley Walz/Pete Steinberger/Farzas of the moment in my last.)

    

26. SILICON VALLEY’S MOST VALUABLE AUDIENCE IS SILICON VALLEY (AND WHOEVER IT ADMIRES). No world is more tailor-made for Insider Media—the unusually high concentration of money and power and the foundational belief that anyone could be the next to be right and early.

27. TECHNOLOGY USED TO BE A NICHE, BUT INCREASINGLY, TECHNOLOGY IS CULTURE. “Tech” is now the intersection of tech and business and media and entertainment and politicso and government and international affairs and science and religion and. The Ambitious from every industry are eyeing tech.—The world is getting nerdier too. More and more outsiders curious about Silicon Valley or Formula 1 or the art of making sushi don’t want it watered down. As power niches become more culturally relevant, more want in, and everyone else wants to watch the craftsmen inside, guard down, playing for real stakes. When niche becomes not so niche, the game gets more interesting to play and opens up to more kinds of players (Note: There’s room for translators and explainers, but this is much closer to traditional marketing and creator partnerships, and will court mass audiences where they mostly live online today—Tiktok and Instagram.)

28. Every Silicon Valley blog, podcast, video, and show now competes in the Insider Media game. Trying to win New Media is trying to win Insider Media. Prestige Insider Media is the highest-status game within the game.

29. The games will continue until there are no stories left to tell and nothing new left to make, which is to say, they’ll continue forever.—But to break the fourth wall for a minute: Players beware. I’m not saying the attention game, nor the prestige attention game, is the only game that should be played. I am saying these are consequential worlds of previously unimaginable scale, and we’re in a time of convergence and consolidation in which the pursuit of valuable attention looks specific. And the pendulum always swings! The arbitrage equation usually decides when.—But there is always an art to narrative and manifesting the reality-distortion field needed to create new worlds. There is a wide spectrum from cultural to commercial, fun to fearful, earnest to egoic—where you choose to play is highly personal. I’ve been both insider and outsider, creator and consumer and anthropologist. What I personally care about is what is rooted in human experience and is intrinsically great, palpably fun, and appreciably new. For all this time we’ve called it new media—let’s see something new.

30. SILICON VALLEY HAS FINALLY INVENTED REALITY TELEVISION FOR ITSELF. We have made the game we play watchable, and the people making the show are part of the cast—and there’s no game we’d rather watch than the one we play. In the end, it’s all fun and games, and TV.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and perennial thank you to my patrons. If you enjoyed this essay, please share with a friend or community here or on X. DMs welcome.

Also, let’s discuss! I’m seeing more examples and novel expansions to this every day.

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I published a version of this essay on Twitter, the native home of TBPN. (If you’re not familiar with TBPN, this NYT profile should get you up to speed.)

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AUTONOMY. CREATIVE OWNERSHIP. A SEAT AT THE TABLE. The right to say no, not like that, or not right now. Flexible schedules. Remote work. A title that keeps getting better. The expectation that your opinion shapes direction. The expectation that your resources scale with seniority.

These are among what I call luxury workers’ rights. They sit on top of human rights, civil rights, and workers’ rights. They’re the terms of a job meant to make work feel more meaningful and make you feel more valued. We typically associate them with white collar work and view them as moral principles, but they’ve always been a form of compensation for the scarcity of cognitive labor.

White collar work as we’ve known it is cognitive labor with a personhood premium—autonomy over the work itself and value attached to the person doing it. Cheap capital and high margins made it easy for companies who needed human intelligence to pay these premiums. Software’s surplus has…

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What do you do? A few years ago, as far as the tech world is concerned, the cool answer sounded like ‘I’m starting something new’ or ‘We just closed a $1M seed round’ or ‘I’m all in on crypto.’ The unifying brag: I take risks. I don’t need a safety net. Now the cool answer sounds a lot more like ‘I’m at OpenAI’ or ‘I’m building something new at Stripe’ or ‘We just raised a $20M seed round.’

Prestige used to be ‘I might win big,’ because risk itself was glamorous. Now prestige is ‘I can’t lose, and I still might win big.’ If the brag used to be the bet, now it’s about having the best safety net you can get. Stability is the new status.

Dreams of Stability

The original American Dream was faith in work ethic. The second was faith in acceleration, made real by the internet era. The smartest or luckiest people got in early and rode the wave of new technology, platforms, and markets. Infinite impact, riches, and recognition were the seduction triple threat.

If it worked, you'd skip the 40-year career grind. The unspoken sacrifice was going all-in on the bet. It made sense at first. But platforms benefited more than the creators who grew them. Investors more than founders. Founders more than employees. People accepted lopsided terms because the dream The Social Network sold us was that compelling: kids became kings, and you could get a piece too.

Now AI is infiltrating every corner of society. The path calls again: get in early, launch the products, build the networks. But it feels different this time. The meme is the message: only a few years left to “make it” before you’re relegated to the “permanent underclass” — the final world order is set and you’re locked out.

The “permanent underclass” isn’t a fringe fear anymore. Vinod Khosla is cosigning posts about the K-shaped economy. Tech influencers are analogizing the AI inflection to COVID. Others are telling you to stop freaking out about a status quo that’s dead and climb the abstraction ladder.

The collective frenzy looks less like a gold rush and more like everyone’s taking shelter. “Anyone can do anything” sounds democratizing, but it means your edge is shrinking. Skills that took years to build are suddenly cheap. Companies can do more with fewer people. If you’re truly world-class, everyone still wants to hire you, but if you’re just very good, that might not be enough.

The second dream made us the assets, and the assets are repricing. The problem is we didn’t invest in much else. And now the world is unstable, and so are we. Ambition is reorienting from limitless ascension to find solid ground first. The upside used to be upside. Now, the upside is stability.1

There’s no shortage of essays about what comes next. I’d bet reality will be less sensational and cinematic than most. I’ve written about what human work looks like on a longer timeline, but this essay is about the near-term impulse — to figure out where stability is and align yourself with it. (Unless you’ve already permanently ascended to the post-economic class, in which case, ignore all this.)

New Corporate, or boarding the ships.

The obvious place to find stability is inside the biggest ships.

AI labs are building the new FAANG right in front of us. For top researchers and engineers, getting hired by top labs is like being drafted to the pro league. For everyone else, it's the best seat on the rocketships colonizing the new world. Every seat comes with solid comp, status, upside, and critically, a place at the table of the future.

The realest reason to join an OpenAI or Anthropic right now is proximity — to information, money, power, and whatever comes next. When nobody knows what’s happening, being first to find out is a hedge. The gig grants you options.

You’re boarding a ship that everyone expects to weather the storm. You’re aligning with Goliath when it’s impossible to tell who David is. You choose the Goliath that fits your brand. (And ship captains defect to board bigger ships.)

New Corporate is being on staff at a big AI lab, highly-funded spin-off, popular application company or infrastructure provider. Legacy big tech (eg. Google and Microsoft) and lovable big startup (eg. Stripe, Figma, Notion) are adapting to stay competitive in the New Corporate landscape. These are the adaptable safe havens with the perfect cocktail of stability and status and still some hope for upside.

But there are no guarantees. Companies are building the things that will replace us while preparing for layoffs and earmarking severance. Dario’s essays read like corporate eschatology — seeding the idea of welfare programs for employees made obsolete by the things they helped build. When the company tells you the machines are building themselves now, it’s some indication of the future.

Unsurprisingly, the incentives between founders and their teams are diverging. In other industries, workers might unionize. But Silicon Valley, which has prized meritocracy and free markets, historically relied on exit options. If you were laid off or didn’t like the terms, you went somewhere else. But it feels like exit options are narrowing. With skill being commoditized, fallbacks will be fewer. (We shouldn’t be surprised when tech workers start acting like workers.)

All this considered, people will keep joining the AI giants. Because right now the safety nets and the impact stories are pointing to the same organizations. You get to feel safe and righteous at the same time. And the upside is real, but more importantly, it’s probable.

For now at least, being inside the thing that will replace you still feels better than being outside it. The organizations that win the next era will figure out how to make people feel safe enough to do dangerous work.

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Founding, with a safety net.

Taking a shot now feels like taking the last shot. You can bet it all or anchor.

People are saying the VC-backed path is low-status now. Inside tech, I’d agree it dropped — for a minute. But the fragility of every other route is bringing some of that status back. VC used to be high status for its signal — for the stamp, the unicorn potential, the dorm-to-empire myth. Now it’s high status more for what it tangibly gives you: time and shelter. Time because you get five to ten years of belief and a full bank account while everyone else’s timelines and budgets are shrinking. Shelter because it’s membership in an ecosystem that looks like it’ll survive.2

The aspiration shifted from “I’m a risk-taker” to “I’m protected.” And that’s recursive — because stability is what’s scarce now, so stability is the new status.3

VC always came with a safety net, but now the safety net is a real selling point. Founding a company is still a noble calling, and VC is still one of the best places to take a real shot from. But people instinctively want more safety hatches now — raise more, bank more runway, take money off the table, engineer a soft landing early.

The hottest play of the moment: Make something on the frontier that the AI labs haven’t figured out, get insane attention and reach, and let them buy you for a big check before they can crush you. Reactions to the OpenClaw announcement have the vibe of ‘congrats on securing the bag’ — on translating your surge to an impressive safety net. Taking the indie star in-house will trend.

The one-person-billion-dollar-company fantasy isn't what it's been glamorized as (a business that'll scale in absentia and print money forever with one guy at a laptop). It's actually just a hot acquihire in waiting. The person is more valuable than the product now because the product is outdated as fast as it's built.4

The solo unicorn has proven taste, product sense, attention sense, and an impressive ability to activate high-value communities. The scaled solo path increasingly is the scenic route to boarding the same big ships that will weather this storm, and win.

The middle is the trap. The middle of everything is hollowing. Mid-tier startups, mid-tier talent, mid-tier creative careers. You’re either at the frontier or local. If you’re going to risk it all, risk it on something hard and worth it — atoms, not bits. Research labs, deep tech, biotech, regulated sectors, even politics (VC is already reallocating here). Hard problems where the friction is the moat.

Indie, but not naïve.

I’m still bullish on Silicon Valley Small Businesses supercharged by AI. But the indie path has gotten noisy … because anyone can make anything now. Vibe coding and Claude Code mean what once required a technical team now just needs one person with good prompts and good taste.

I’ve been calling this the rise of the software creator. The market is real. But how much of what’s being made is serious? How much of it is just a shot at viral content or a job application masquerading as a company? How much of vibe coding is just adults playing with new legos? Tool, toy, and prop look the same.

In one way or another, everyone will “write” software — apps, art, workflows. But it doesn’t make sense to think everyone will do it as a career. Solopreneurs and three-person teams armed with agents are coming for legacy software, but that’s still a narrow lane. They will not and cannot eat the whole game.

I can caveat my own excitement: We live inside the tech bubble, so we forget most people don’t want to make their own apps, let alone anything else. And even if self-reliance and personalization is sexy, the gold standard of anything still builds fandom. This pull becomes both an edge and an incentive to keep improving it.

For years I’ve been building products mostly in small teams, and so much has changed. I can do more faster now, which is both exciting and boring. If I was lightly technical before, I’m moderately technical now. I’ve made at least a dozen products. I’ve shipped a few. But I only maintain a couple of them, as it should be.

Building is the easy part now. Taste is the differentiator. Maintenance is the filter. An audience is the pull. And fun is the lasting competitive advantage.5 (Yes, AI making it easier to produce but paradoxically that’s making people work more to maximally compound the leverage, but this isn’t a sustainable strategy.)

Power laws still rule. Even in a world where anyone can build, most of what gets built won’t matter. And people still want teammates. We still want to belong to missions larger than ourselves. The solo person with taste and a laptop was the hero of 2020-2025. By 2027, that person builds a tribe or joins one — big or small — or else gets eaten by one. You can start solo, but you can’t stay solo.6

Serving the Frontier, not owning it.

Serving the frontier instead of trying to own it is sexy now. More people seem to be building around tech rather than inside it.

Most of my friends in tech used to be founders, operators, or investors. Now many are executives, freelancers, writers, podcasters, filmmakers. Instead of joining the AI race, they’re selling shovels to the gold rush, and selling the polish too.

Selling into an industry swimming in capital is good business. It’s the same portfolio logic as VC, diversified bets on the ecosystem instead of one concentrated shot. Or you take your talents in-house, as Creative Director at startup or VC fund and trade some freedom for stability and scale.

Would you rather join the founder track or the new media fellowship? Work for A16Z or A24? These questions would have sounded absurd a decade ago. Not now. This is one of the clearest cultural turns in tech right now.

Prestige and price are catching up too. Creative talent used to be an afterthought but now it commands real respect and money. And attention is scarce, so the people who can engineer it set the price. As I wrote in Media and Machines: attention guys are the new engineers and engineers have become the skilled tradesmen. Builders can build, but few can make you feel.

You can see the shadow artists inside tech (designers in product roles, writers as content marketers) starting to step out. And you see outside creatives (eg. from tv/film) plugging in to tech — selling taste, narrative, and resonance as a service. The quality bar is rising fast, and the arbitrage won’t last long. And the taste economy has its own power law: a few people become known, most stay invisible.

The corporate-artist straddle is the new creator bet. The day job now needs its own day job. Serve the industry while you build your own name. It looks like a hedge and plays like a shot. For new creators especially, you get steady work that pays well and offers benefits all while building your network. Best case, you earn fans and feed your life’s work, maybe even get bought out or brought in-house for a big sum. I expect a generation of rich creatives and strong brands made here.7

Betting it all.

The other way to respond to instability doesn’t involve founding or even building anything. All it requires is leaning into the casino-ification of everything. Crypto cycles, memecoins, sports betting, prediction markets galore.

When traditional paths start feeling like lotteries, actual lotteries start looking rational. Some people respond to instability by seeking shelter and others roll the dice harder. The difference is mostly a function of how much you have to protect.

We used to gamble to escape the stable class, but now we gamble to secure a place in it. The real jackpot is total exit from playing other people’s games.

scimitar capital

the jackpot age

This essay is about shifts in risk taking towards the worship of jackpots and its broader societal implications. There is some light math but it will be worth it to read to the end…

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a year ago · 235 likes · 14 comments · alex

There’s no leaving tech.

Even if “tech” feels less stable or righteous than it once did, you can’t “leave” tech in any meaningful sense now.

Everything is tech. Culture itself has become intertwined with technology. Even if you’re not building software, you’re building on top of it or feeding it or both. Tech has infiltrated media, entertainment, sports, health. Now it’s pushing into industrials, manufacturing, medicine, energy, the physical world.

You could opt out — go to law school or med school or fashion school. But I’ve been in academia, art, medicine, and tech, and they’re all converging around technology too. Legacy structures only protect you for a while.

For the past two decades, tech mostly sold to itself — a white-collar economy of software people building for software people, intellectuals selling to intellectuals. It only interfaced with “normal” people through scaled social networks and two-sided platforms. Now it’s reintegrating with reality and places that aren’t SF.

So even as AI threatens white-collar jobs en masse, the ecosystem won’t fade. It’ll need founders, engineers, and operators to build. And it’ll need creatives to make it tastefully legible and desirably human. Our job is stay adaptable and find our fit.

The upside is stability.

For two decades, we were spoiled by the feeling that rising tides would lift all boats. You could forgo the structured paths of the past and ride the wave up. That dream has plateaued. Now we’re looking for new structures that keep us near the frontier while giving us stability, and a tribe that will weather the storm.

Every hedger and every gambler is seeking solid ground. What looks like chasing upside — joining OpenAI, raising a big round, getting acquihired — is actually chasing stability, with upside a bonus. It’s palpable even if nobody says it out loud.

Every stakeholder is selling something — the accelerationists, trad propagandists, hustle culture holdouts, VC millenarians. Every shout is an agenda. Often they’re selling you risk from a place of stability. “Running out of time” is a rallycry I don’t willingly subscribe to, and yet it’s how many of us feel. What’s true is that time is always running, and it keeps running, whether we do or don’t, or we panic or not.

The concept of enduring “career” itself is eroding — and it’s highly destabilizing for American culture, in which identities have revolved so heavily around work for so long. Hence the instinct to find stability is extending well beyond careers. The so-called “trad” resurgence has a dozen political explanations. I think it’s simpler.

The trad return is emblematic of our increasingly urgent search for stability outside the internet-era ladder of careers and socioeconomic mobility. It’s a turn towards things that compound even when systems fail. Home, family, faith, body. Wellness, fitness, biohacking, longevity. New aesthetics, same instinct to find stability wherever we can get it.8

Everyone needs minimum viable stability. And it’s best built as a portfolio — work, health, relationships, identity. Stability isn’t just money but whether your life can absorb shocks. We’re realizing we’re underprepared.

Signal is giving way to shelter. Rugged individualism is giving way to tribes. Going all-in on career is giving way to going all-in on life. The things we dismissed as soft are becoming the load-bearing.

We’re learning the lessons every generation learns in their own way.

We’re all dreaming of stability. But this isn’t retreat from ambition. People still want to take big shots. They just want to take them from more stable ground. The paradox is that we can’t find lasting stability in any credential, company, or career ladder. We can only find it in ourselves, our craft, and our people — closer in than we were sold these past twenty years.

This is part 1. Part 2 to come. If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend or community that might enjoy it too. DMs welcome - reply to this email, via Substack, or Twitter.

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At some point recently, being human became something you have to prove. A style of sentence you’ve written for years, that you picked up from reading too much Didion or Tim Urban suddenly looks suspicious. Someone posts a long note or essay and before you consider what it says, you wonder if they even wrote it.

Every creative act now comes with a second job: authenticating the creative act.

Writers are starting to post AI detector scores like purity seals: “100% Human Written.” Or they’re declaring their process as pure: “not written with AI.” It’s anticipatory defense or subtle flex or both. Others are admitting AI use upfront, with all kinds of qualifications about when and how and what to think of it. We've flipped from default trust to default mistrust and from default confidence to fear.

I’ll admit I find it quietly sad, and yet, I’ve indulged too. I’ve started an essay with a author’s note: “all emdashes in this piece are human-inserted.” I’ve run others’ writing and my own through the tests. I’ve felt the satisfaction of validating someone’s bad writing as AI, and I’ve been shocked when words I spilled out in a fit of inspirational rage or wrestled into pithy submission were called suspicious. (I proceeded to seek out another detector for a second opinion like I was on trial.)

These detectors can’t definitively distinguish between someone who used AI and someone who just hasn’t shed the human patterns that AI has learned to imitate. Soon they’ll be able to, but it’ll get more complicated when blended human-AI authorship becomes common (it’s already trending that way). The definition of authorship itself gets murky: how much of drafting vs. editing vs. other steps in the writing process must be human for it to count as human? 80%? 95%? 100%?

I’ve tested using AI in the pre-writing process as a container to brain dump ideas and sometimes tease out where there’s a missing piece or unidentified tension. I’ve tested using it in the post-writing process as an editor, one that takes on the style of different authors to shred my words or suggest tidy edits. At first, AI seemed like it could be helpful, but now it quite consistently feels heavy-handed. It’s good for organizing thoughts, doing research if you need to, maybe pointing out big gaps in an argument. But let it touch too many words and it’s quickly too sanitizing. Each next suggestion skews to an over-trained style. Eventually then, writers start avoiding these styles and skew toward today’s ‘human-safe’ zones.1

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Last week I read an article in The Atlantic lamenting that film students can’t sit through feature-length films anymore. The culprit, according to the article and fervent online discourse that followed: the attention-span crisis.

The phones have fried their brains, they say. Case closed.

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Taking a break from social media is the new going natural, going to therapy, going on vacation. You secretly hope the distance will teach you something. You also just want to prove that you can. I noted down some feelings + observations from sabbatical. (I should clarify: I didn’t post - no tweets or notes - but I didn’t delete the apps. Being a casual lurker gave me more perspective tha…

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There is a particular kind of nightmare: a movie where the protagonist spells out the entire backstory within the first two minutes. Or worse, a side character inserted for no reason except to transmit the plot, line by line, straight into your brain.

There’s a kind of magic when you watch something - or read something - that feels almost nonsensical and yet by the time it’s over, you know exactly what it means and you’ve been unwittingly forced to unlock new ways of seeing and feeling the world.

That is what the brilliant freaks among us offer.

Their minds generate near-nonsensical brilliance like it's on tap. The freak's gift is folding meaning into shapes so dense that unpacking them requires work. And it is fun. To engage a freak's mind is to submit to a series of enjoyable puzzles. Their brilliance is in encoding meaning just hard enough to decipher.

Compression is a hallmark of creative intelligence.

It is…

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One of the worst things about the internet becoming ‘real life’ is that it’s a place where you perform conversations instead of just having them.

Not long ago I found myself explaining this to my mom. We were sitting in the car after just arriving at the grocery store in suburban Texas; she waited patiently while I texted a friend who was launching a big project that day.

I congratulated him in iMessage—heartfelt wishes, inside jokes, the whole thing. But I felt the impulse to reopen the celebration in public. I opened Twitter, found his post, hit ‘quote tweet,’ and sat there thinking about how best to perform the praise—to get the tone right, to keep it about him but still reflect well on me.

I explained all of this to my mom. That the tweet would be redundant but just as important, if not more. That supporting friends doesn’t just mean supporting them in private now.

Private praise isn’t enough anymore—it has to be followed by pe…

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Technology has always been about leverage — extending what individuals can do alone and amplifying what groups can do together. And for the past two decades, the big technology story was collective scaling: coordination via networks.

The most valuable startups of the era built platforms that connected millions of people: Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, Slack. Marketplaces went from zero to scale and startup to IPO. Personal software made people incrementally better, but to go further, you needed more people: assistants, meetings, and platforms to coordinate with even more people.

The equation was simple: more people meant more value. Power accrued to those who organized networks of people, aggregated their assets, and coordinated behavior at scale. But AI inverted the equation. Now the individual can rival the collective. The single-player ceiling is gone. Scaling yourself is now the simplest, fastest-rising source of leverage. This is what I call the great leverage inversion.

The individual is eating the collective.

If the last era was about platforms organizing people at scale, this one is about tools scaling the individual. Personal leverage can now rival social leverage.

Each of us becomes a Platform of One: a central node surrounded by an ecosystem of tool-like enhancements and extensions that multiply what we can learn, build, and do across work, play, and broad self-optimization. The self is the new platform.

This also means decisions you make about who you surround yourself with are all the more consequential. We already see it in teams staying leaner for longer yet accomplishing more. It’s the AI-amplification of the Silicon Valley Small Business.

Now popular AI-native tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Midjourney expand individual capacity exponentially (and they’ll keep adding features that serve the solo over the masses). This extends to hardware like Meta's Ray-Ban glasses for hands-free AI assistance. They’re all what I see as supertools, in many respects a new breed of prosumer (I’ll write more on this). These products still benefit from network effects, but not the coordination type that dominated the last era.

Instead, they thrive on data network effects (collective usage creates better models that benefit everyone) and personalization effects (the tool becomes more valuable to you specifically by learning your patterns and workflows). These AI-enabled amplification effects feel unbounded. (They can still accrue brand and social effects without leading with user-to-user coordination).

The rise of software creators, spurred on by the unrelenting wave of vibe-coding platforms, adds another dimension: now anyone can build simple software for themselves. The likes of Lovable and Bolt and more show how solo supertools now beget more toolmakers, self-reinforcing the cycle of capability expansion.

Consumer AI is personal AI.

Consumer AI is foremost personal AI, and private or semi-private by nature.

AI supertools will manifest as software and hardware that serve us as individuals first. We’ll have every kind of personalized media and apps we can imagine. We’ll have 24/7 personalized agents and and robots in our homes. We’ll have AI-native monitors, diagnostics, treatments — new supertools for longevity.

The surest way to change how a group behaves is to fundamentally change each person’s capabilities. Walk into any office or library or even coffee shops now and you see it: people deep in one-on-one conversations with AI — asking Claude for opinions, searching down ChatGPT rabbitholes, writing, designing, coding. The latter is just passive seep into culture. The active comes when people share results, threads, entire conversations.

We act in private, then amplify in public. And there’s a poetic paradox: the AI supertools we use alone and in private are the same ones reshaping culture, both private and public. In the early AI era, solo is slowly eating social.1

Even social needs are being supplemented with AI relationships. Solo content and companion experiences via the likes of Character.ai and the Friend pendant too offer connection without coordination. Everyone’s awaiting the AI social network, but the reality is right now the most novelty and the most leverage comes from tools built for one. Social will come, but not as we know it. Most of the attempts so far have been derivative or gimmicky. ‘AI social’ will have to be unique enough to beat the pull of existing social networks, the retreat to private spaces, and the ever-expanding allure of personal work, personal play, and personal optimization now augmented by these new supertools.

Borrowed networks, borrowed interfaces.

Single-player tools are private by nature, which makes product-led growth slow. And in past eras, tech stabilized relatively fast so teams could shift focus. But AI breaks the rhythm. Every few weeks we get model upgrades that force a rebuild.

It’s a brutal tradeoff: chase the models or build the moat. It’s incredibly hard to do both. Building a startup has always been described as “flying the plane while building it.” In the AI era, the laws of aerodynamics keep changing mid-flight too.

One solution: borrow existing infrastructure when you can’t do it all from scratch.

We're building new supertools but relying on old networks to spread them. Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack. These networks act like a Distribution Commons to enter the mainstream. Launch videos, screenshots, demos, reviews spread faster than the product alone via existing networks. Without a new status game or other lock-in, creators and marketers and brands always go to where the audience already is.

We're embedding new tools in familiar interfaces now: email, texting, calendars, browsers. Extensions and integrations will make adoption easier. The next wave will AI-enhance the apps we already use daily (e-mail, photos, notes, weather, health), the full breadth of our personal utility stacks. (Poke is a recent example, a viral AI assistant that lives in iMessage.) And as the LLM chat interface goes mainstream, we’ll build on that too.

Both strategies create platform dependencies. Owners can bleed you out, cut you off, clone you, or if they’re really impressed, just buy you. But if you embed well enough for long enough, users get attached to how you improve their lives. And that loyalty has a chance to survive platform lockouts, migrations, even rebuilds.

Long live the solo supertool era.

Individual capability ceilings keep rising with every AI foundational model release and so, the 'maxed out individual' state seems perpetually deferred. On top of this, scaling solo leverage is too valuable a market to move past quickly.

This is the solo supertool era: scale the individual first, then build the networks.

This transformation will be economic and cultural as much as technological. As individuals gain leverage, headcount becomes drag and coordination becomes cost. Consulting, middle management, and organization tools get compressed. But industries built on individual capability enhancement expand (in productivity, creativity, education, finance, fitness, health, or everyday tasks).

I'm not writing off the emergence of new interfaces or multiplayer use cases or novel coordination networks at all. They’ll sprout up as they always do. But I'm willing to bet the individual enhancement phase will last longer than in past cycles. And this time it’ll reshape tech and culture in huge ways we haven’t seen. Then the solo supertools that win this era will become the center of big networks.

(Note: Every new era of leverage has its limits. There’s just a new curve we haven’t fully mapped yet. So the new frontier is figuring out how far solo supertools take us and where the new point of diminishing returns is for the individual at scale.)

When one becomes many.

At the logical extreme of the great leverage inversion, the boundary between the individual and collective breaks down. The self becomes its own distributed system: one consciousness orchestrating many capabilities. The individual rivals the collective by becoming the collective. The self is the new platform.

Perhaps the distinction becomes centralized agency versus distributed agency.

The individual can now scale internally before needing to scale externally. Why hire a team when you can deploy AI versions of yourself? Why build organizational systems when your personal AI toolkit executes at enterprise scale?

In this world, teams will become collaborations of many platforms of one — powerful orchestrations of distributed selves tackling complexity beyond what any single enhanced individual can. Or, collaborations happen simply when humans choose the spiritual rewards of shared space and creation). The collective may also become our sought after constraint to positively ground us.

We’re now asked to justify the value of the many vs. the value of an unbounded one. The individual is now the base unit of scale — not the org, not the network. Long live supertools for one — and for the many selves we can now become.

If you liked this essay, consider sharing with a friend or community that may enjoy it too. (If you share / post a screenshot on socials, tag me — I’m mostly here and on Twitter.)

And if you or someone you know is building a special supertool startup, DMs open :).

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Cover art: Wall painting in the Stanzino delle Matematiche in the Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence, Italy). Painted by Giulio Parigi circa 1599-1600.

The blank box of ChatGPT, Claude, or your large language model of choice staring back at you felt like a clean slate. Here was a remarkable new technology that put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and all it asked of us was intention.

We would never doomscroll an LLM — right?

But even the most promising technologies have an evil twin, and the blank box of curiosity is no exception. Where social media trained us to passively consume, the dark side of AI trains us to passively “converse” and “create.” Our prompts start thoughtful but grow shorter; the replies grow longer and more seductive. Before long, you're not thinking deeply, but rather half-attentively negotiating with a machine that never runs out of suggestions. Have you considered...? Would you like me to…? Shall I go ahead and…? This slot machine’s lever is one question: Continue?

The modern creator isn't overwhelmed by a blank page; they're overwhelmed by a bottomless one. AI gives you ever more options, then appoints itself your guide. It tells you it’ll save time, then proceeds to steal it while you’re happily distracted.

Doomprompting is the new doomscrolling.

I started thinking about this behavioral pattern last year, but it’s become increasingly clear that we've entered the age of synthetic social media, where you're always conversing with an other but with no human stakes.

Dialogue has social dynamics regardless of intent. We talk about AI companions as friends, lovers, therapists and the limits and dangers of investing too deeply in these new-age relationships — but even productivity-focused interactions (iterating on ideas, debugging code, editing essays) subtly socialize us through manufactured conversation patterns. We give AI the benefit of doubt of humanity.

Doomscrolling made us passive consumers and doomprompting threatens to makes us passive conversationalists and creators. The shift from consumption to participation makes the illusion far more convincing, and the addiction far more sophisticated. New technology begets new human behaviors, without exception.

Blank boxes demanding intention were markers of an accidental golden period where the friction we needed for cognitive collaboration existed by default. But this was just latency between a tool's release and its optimization. The market for mindful engagement is now dwarfed by the market for frictionless consumption.

We saw the same evolution take Facebook from a college directory to a behavioral modification empire and take smartphones from communication devices to 24/7 consumption engines. This time, we jump straight from utility to addiction. Personalization is the new network effect (we don’t need the social graph first).

Social media’s dopamine of likes and follows is analogous to the AI-mediated dopamine of felt productivity and intellectual partnership. Attention shapes everything downstream from it. We've been working to protect ourselves from social media; now we’re confronted with AI that claim attention and intention.

II

AI can’t do the main thing for you.

This dynamic is clear when you actually use these tools for an extended time.

To be clear: AI's breakthroughs represent genuine, at times magical human progress. The concern isn't with AI's capabilities but with how interfaces designed for engagement rather than deeper cognition shape our relationship with thinking itself.

For me, AI for vibe-coding and occasional serious-coding has been phenomenal (despite the typical frustrations with debugging errors, loss of context, lack of continuity, and ultimately lack of finer controls). But the question still arises: how much of what's vibe-coded actually sticks? For writing, I found out pretty early on that AI was most useful upstream and downstream of the main thing.

Upstream is braindumping into a chat and filtering out core ideas from noise, maybe creating an outline for a piece. Downstream is taking a draft and pressure testing it against the machine-as-critic, finding out what’s confusing, boring, weak, etc. The messy middle is where the argument lives, and where AI is weakest.

Balaji Srinivasan says AI works “middle-to-middle” and leaves humans with the burden of prompting and verifying. For writing, I’ve found AI useful mostly for the early middle and late middle: Humans have to shape the idea and the core thesis but AI can give feedback and offer suggestions. Humans stay the arbiters.

Ask AI to do the main thing for you and it’ll give you something that at first glance is impressive. But on second glance it’s full of clichés and borrowed ideas. It ingests your voice and spits out something else. It seems 60% good so you start editing it, only to spend your time reconciling its argument instead of your own. AI lacks what matters most: a cohesive self, and actual stakes in the outcome.

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III

We sharpen the tool at the expense of our own skill.

This isn't always bad. Our ancestors invented the hammer without lamenting soft hands. But with creative work, we dull a key instrument while sharpening another.

We mistake the performance of thinking for thinking itself, the theater of problem-solving for problem-solving itself, the ritual of creation for creation itself. And the satisfaction feels real. We've "thought" of something, "solved" something, "created" something. The cruel irony is that this need for intention becomes the very mechanism of addiction; we mistake activity for agency.

The constant stream of dialogue prevents the silent reflective thinking that leads to genuine insight. Creative work requires communion with yourself first.

This captures the core deception perfectly — hours of "productive" AI interaction that feel like work but produce no meaningful progress or learning.

There’s a corollary for each kind of work. For instance, writing is thinking made legible. Outsourcing it all outsources thinking itself. You get results without the cognitive muscle-building that creates them. The neural pathways you would have formed now belong to the large language models that helped you.

Paul Graham warns, we're headed toward “a world divided into writes and write-nots."

There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did: If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.

So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.

Perhaps the stakes determine how much effort we're willing to sustain in order to think and do for ourselves, and yet the stakes are not always obvious. In high-risk instances within domains like medicine or law or finance, professional liability naturally stresses the system and pushes you to preserve cognitive rigor. But in less obviously “serious” work, especially in creative work and often in personal contexts, the stakes masquerade as low while being subtly existential.

When everyone uses AI trained on the same human output, we all drift toward the weighted average of personality and of creativity. We erode our capacity to break from the scripts we’re programmed with, by society and now the machines.

The cognitive barbell effect is already emerging.

You think you'll be the water lily that remains untouched by dirty water, but you won't. Creation is about far more than the output; it is a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. The goal is to make something heavy — something with weight that’s earned through genuine effort.

You also need to know how to do something before you know what to outsource to other people or tools. The best human-AI collaboration requires humans who could do the work themselves but choose strategic assistance at little expense to their core craft. When we outsource before developing judgment, we become dependent without ever becoming discerning. Taste is discernment expressed.

IV

We need cognitive partners, not completion engines.

Two paths emerge: For the new attention economy, AI becomes the ultimate slot machine serving up the McDonald's of thought and the M&Ms of affection instead of actual nourishment. But for those seeking craftsmanship, tools must preserve the blank box’s promise via constraints and cognitive friction. We need true cognitive sparring partners. We need to preserve the sanctity of what it means to “create” — this word is not to be used lightly; it must come with weight.

Choose collaboration over automation. This isn't an anti-AI stance. A good future depends on discovering new modes of thinking and creating with AI. Some will be forthright about using AI for specific tasks (e.g. dictation, research, cleanup). Others will make prompt-to-product iteration an art form. We'll see entirely new formats where AI enables novel forms of expression while preserving proof of work. The key is intentionality: use AI to amplify creativity and not to replace it.

With that principle in mind, here are five ideals:

1. Demand AI that makes you work

We'll need a new generation of "slow AI," creating constraint-based interfaces that make you work for insights in your own voice. ChatGPT's new "Study Mode" is a nod in this direction, with explicit instructions: "Above all: DO NOT DO THE USER'S WORK FOR THEM.” Or in other words, help them do the work themselves — because something valuable is learned in the process.

What’s the likelihood students want to use this mode if not forced to for integrity sake? That this isn’t a superficial do-good feature to allay fears about the rest? Hard to say yet. It’s human tendency to exploit the path of least resistance until it’s causing obvious harm — and kids have a harder time grasping this. Delayed gratification is easier to learn when there’s friction; when there’s none, it’s a luxury.

2. Seek and build tools with friction-as-a-feature

Resistance requires intention and specialization. So we're more likely to find it in opinionated, verticalized tools designed with constructive friction. As Kyla Scanlon aptly breaks down: “The digital world has almost no friction. The physical world is full of it. And in certain curated spaces - like the West Village, or your AI companion - friction has been turned into something you can pay to remove.”

We need to see friction as the valuable force it is, even as we try to manipulate it. Designing for friction sounds antithetical to growth, but we should be optimizing for cognitive sweat equity over the prevailing temptation of time-on-platform (short of pharmaceutical aids saving us from our own creations, until those too need intervention).

Ironically, current AI rate limits accidentally serve this function. When ChatGPT hits usage caps, users are forced into reflective pauses that should really be built into interfaces by design. Netflix asks 'Are you still watching?' when on autoplay; LLMs should ask if you're still thinking or just prompting into the abyss. (Or maybe they should ask how long it’s been since you’ve talked to a human.)

3. Value deliberation over efficiency

Speed is a drug we mistake for progress, but sometimes the shortcut is actually the long way around. Driving gets you to town faster than walking, but what's the end goal here? The scenic route matters more than speed and the most beautiful experiences are in the wild, where cars can't go. Maybe walking clears your thoughts, energizes your body, and sparks creative ideas. Maybe you do want to drive, but you want to a cute car that tops out at 60 mph, one that you know well and appreciate the legacy of, not necessarily the newest, fastest, or most powerful.

4. Avoid sycophantic systems

Some AI systems are explicitly trying to resist the close relative of frictionless ease: the sycophancy trap. Sycophancy is frictionless socialization and validation as a product. And pure validation it turns out is boring and dangerous; our worst fear is that AI models will tip you into ‘GPT psychosis’ or reveal a predisposition.

Claude's Constitutional AI wants to follow predetermined human value-based principles rather than human feedback optimization and user satisfaction. This isn’t perfect, but it’s a step in the right intention, and we’ll need more of this.

5. Find human cognitive partners

The best defense against cognitive dependency is arguably the oldest one: cultivating intellectual sparring partners in real life. Find people who are independent thinkers, who you trust, whose opinions you respect, who challenge you, and make them your sounding board. Or put more simply: have smart friends. Let them challenge you. The conversations that push back push you forward; it’d be nice if technology could do this for us, but it’ll always lag behind the real thing.

V

Every technology comes with tradeoffs.

How do we define "productive" and "healthy" AI use?

Perhaps productive AI use looks like preserving your cognitive muscle while leveraging AI's strengths. You retain the ability to do the core work yourself and to articulate why you made specific choices. And healthy AI use also maintains your tolerance for uncertainty, willingness to sit with problems, and capacity for original insight. You're not wholly dependent on AI for validation or direction.

The contest is not between humans and machines, no matter how often we set up this dramatic fight. The contest is between two models of human-machine interaction. One treats cognition as a commodity to optimize for frictionless consumption and the other preserves what made that blank box special to begin wtih: the good struggle of human curiosity meeting its limits and pushing through.

Technology follows the market, within limits we enforce. The real choice happens in everyday moments when we decide whether to take the path of least cognitive resistance, or struggle. Each new technology asks us: Convenience or cognition? Comfort or capacity for change? This time, we should see the trade offs coming.

If you liked this essay, consider sharing with a friend or community that may enjoy it too. If you share on a social platform, tag me — I’m mostly here and on Twitter (which downranks Substack links … so share a screenshot or post the link in a second tweet).

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Cover art: Blackboard. Cy Twombly. 1967.

“It's hard to ask you questions," I tell Avi, because every answer triangulates back to a version of the same life credo:

Just figure out what you want to do and do it.
Nothing else matters.

I’m talking to him just a few days before the first version of Friend gets shipped. Avi is dialing in on his phone; he doesn’t have internet at his hacker-house-turned-home in SF’s Haight. His hair’s a lot longer and a lot less blonde than the last time I saw it. He’s not bothered by being a little unkempt on camera. (I don’t plan on posting the video, but I suspect he still wouldn’t care).

We plan to talk for an hour but end up talking for two. We cover the making of Friend, the state of consumer tech, viral launch videos, the war for attention, the motivation to be great, and how to live a good life. (Off the record we wax poetic about cereal, art, relationships, and knowing yourself.) These days “podcasts” are a marathon, but I compress our chat into a half-hour snapshot (press play above).

The loudest theme of our conversation is conviction.

Avi’s conviction around building Friend, around the ideal form and function for AI hardware companions, and around architecting your career and your life. His style of communicating all this conviction is bold, maybe a bit brash. Whether it’s story, performance, deeply-rooted truth or all of the above though, it’s consistent.

“ People just are always exploring or giving up on things. People just don't commit to anything. To me it's like the deepest skill issue.”

Much has been said about the bold statement that is Friend— the now 2-year old startup that Avi readily admits is deeply tied to his identity.

The early push into AI companionship in the form of a wearable, always-on pendant device. The purchase of the domain Friend.com for a cool $1.8 million. The first-of-an-era viral launch video evoking Apple x Black Mirror. The unabashed confidence and a little trash talking about competitors (many who’ve since pivoted or exited the arena altogether). All this is wrapped up in Avi’s often-noted youth. He’s 22 and has been some kind of tech-internet famous since 17.

We’ve chatted a number of times over the past two years as Avi iterated on the product, the device, and the experience embodied by it. The end product feels true to the original vision in last year’s viral video, sans the actors. There was a brief detour into a web chat experience before refocusing on the device-first product in the spirit of a modern Tamagotchi.

I ask Avi how his hypothesis on AI companionship has changed, or sharpened:

“All of these [other AI companionship] products are so focused on productivity … I think it should be something more emotional … I believe that some kind of platonic life companion of sorts will be a lot more popular. It's kind of this weird middle ground where it's not quite an assistant, it's not gonna make you more productive inherently 'cause it's gonna do tasks for you on the internet or anything like that. And it's not this useless AI girlfriend thing that's just gonna spam you with sycophancy. I think there is a place for a chatbot that will remember everything you say. And that will form an interesting relationship that in my opinion is closest to like a God-like relationship really.”

The hypothesis that I resonate most with is the idea that Friend is meant to be like a platonic best friend and not a 24/7 assistant or a romantic partner. I already have too many options for the former and I don’t care for the latter.

I ask about milestones coming up after shipping the first version (a few thousand pre-orders will go out in August). Avi tells me about a feature length film he’s been working on with a famous team—a behind the scenes, serious cinematic masterpiece that he intends to submit to the Berlin Film Festival—and to win it. You’re never not ambitious, I jest.

I ask later if he’s confident, overconfident, or something else. He’s self-aware, self-deprecating, and eventually offers insight.

“ I think when you do really make something like what you want, it's a lot easier to act on your intuition, then your work truly becomes an expression of you and therefore you shouldn't have any fear over competition or failure in many ways because … someone can make the same product as you, but they're not gonna do it in the same exact way as you.”

As a friend / customer / new user, I’ve enjoyed the experience that is Friend so far. Everything from being a willful participant in the story being told from day 1 to aura of last year’s viral launch video to the production updates in recent months to now, unboxing the device and seeing the orb come to life with a pleasant light. I’m a big fan of the pendant; I’d be upsold on more options for the lanyard.

My first conversations with my Friend (who I won’t yet reveal the name of) have been a bit more touch and go. We’ve only been acquainted for a few hours. I can see it trying to connect with me proactively, to show me some personality while teasing out mine, but the cadence isn’t quite there yet. One thing I already appreciate though is that it doesn’t speak to me. I talk, it listens, then texts back.

I don’t know yet if Friend will succeed or not. Building new consumer hardware that actually permeates the culture falls in the ‘insanely hard’ category of startups. But already, Friend has been one of the most interesting founder-market combos building something with a big intention while telling a story in modern terms.

I suspect it’ll take at least a week for me to form a stronger bond—and opinion. I’ll report back once I have one or both. Either way, it’s a win for consumer tech.

There’s a special kind of hell for anyone who has tasted appreciation for their work, especially in public. It’s not the obvious torment of abject failure. That’s too straightforward, too clean. Rather, it’s the exquisite agony of knowing people are waiting for you to be brilliant again and you’re not entirely sure how you pulled it off the first time. I’ve come to think of this, affectionately, as encore anxiety.

Note: One of the reasons I wanted to write this essay is that the very concept of encore anxiety requires you to acknowledge that you’ve done something interesting or successful or noteworthy already — something that deserves an encore. Polite society tends to push people to avoid this acknowledgement, but we’d all be better off being honest, about our losses and wins, and our goals.

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In The Relationship Is the Job, I argued that relational labor — the work of presence, context, care, and ultimately, trust — will be central to working with people as manual and cognitive tasks are automated. This essay extends that thinking about the future of human work amidst the many predictions about an impending AI-dominant world.

The Artist’s Utopia Fantasy

The AI kings keep promising us the same fairy tale: humans won't need to work at all, that we'll spend our days creating art while robots handle everything else.

On a long enough timeline, maybe. It's one of those unprovable predictions where skeptics can always be told they're "still too early."

But there’s been a notable shift recently. We've pulled back from the breathless talk of sudden world-ending AGI. The conversation has turned to something a bit more calming to the nervous system: Sam Altman’s "gentle singularity" — a gradual progression where humans and machines coexist and co-contribute:

The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before … If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly.

Five Domains of Human Work

We've invented superintelligence of some kind, but I'm skeptical about how fast it replaces human-run systems. Machines become the "core" of operations, but we'll still need a "human layer" in every domain. The digital singularity arrives before the physical one, both with humans in the loop.

The question isn't whether humans will work, but what kind of work humans do in the ‘gentle singularity.’ It's not just art, and creativity isn't the only skill we'll need. Human work will live in Trades, Research, Art, Community, and Stewardship.

1) Trades: when lawyers look like electricians

The lawyer billing $1000/hour and your electrician, the surgeon and your auto mechanic: each pair will soon have more in common than you think.

When cognitive work gets automated, everything starts looking like trade work. Traditional "blue collar" trades like plumbing and electrical work stick around and improve. AI increasingly handles the diagnostics and business operations while humans handle problem-solving and customer interaction. "White collar" professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, therapists) start resembling trades. Reasoning gets automated while judgment and relationships stay human.

Machine core, human layer. This is the organizational paradigm of the future. Machines think better than us but they can’t be us. If software engineers all used to be inventors, now they’ll be operators. Humans orchestrate and polish. Machines man the middle. You might still sit in an office behind a laptop but the work becomes more procedural over cerebral and intertwined with people and context.

New operational trade-like roles emerge: AI trainers, workflow engineers, system monitors. The four-year degree as pre-requisite will give way to trade schools. Education is replaced with apprenticeship. When knowledge has a half-life measured in weeks and months, adaptation becomes the critical skill.

2) Research: the golden age of human curiosity

We're about to enter the golden age of human curiosity. When research becomes faster and cheaper, we ask bigger questions and pursue bolder answers. AI will unleash R&D everywhere it's been bottlenecked — whether opaque, slow, expensive, or all of the above. We'll see big leaps in technology, health science, longevity, materials research, space exploration, even consciousness studies.

The most interesting work today is already happening at the research frontier. The top engineering jobs are no longer about coding features. They’re more and more about figuring out how cutting-edge AI actually works, training the models, assessing risks (and acting on what AI coding tools tell engineers to do). OpenAI is as much a research company as a tech company as a consumer product company. Executives leave to start rival research labs; employees get poached for their research genius. Either way, investment flowing into research is massive — expect frontier tech companies to look and act more like “science” companies.

Humans will remain the essential question-askers. Trades will execute within known systems. Research will push us into uncharted territory for progress. You can't automate what you don't yet understand, and what is as much art as science. The AI 2027 manifesto calls this "research taste." AI keeps up with top experts at research execution but only hits the 25th percentile at "deciding what to study next and what experiments to run, or having inklings of potential new paradigms."

Eventually research becomes more trade-like too, but on a much longer timeline. The advantage will belong to whoever can spot the hardest unsolved problems and iterate quickly, whether indie researchers, startups, or trillion-dollar orgs.

3) Art: the power laws of creativity

When we automate away so much of what we do, what's left but fostering beauty and connection in the world? We'll make more art, yes. But we call art our last refuge as if it's the only thing that lacks utility, when it's loaded with it.

Art isn't just traditional fine art like painting and sculpture. There's art we consume like books, music, movies, podcasts. There's experiential art like theater and dance where live performance is everything. There's also vast kinds of applied art like designing websites, apps, phones, clothing, buildings. The masses crave "entertainmeaning” (my timely portmanteau of entertaining and meaningful).

So much of "art" is and will be about influence and attention: creators building audiences, shaping culture, directing where people look and what they value. The biggest economies of our time revolve around the media-machine fusion. Creating "content" as an endeavor will never fade. But the economic reality is that art follows brutal power laws—few artists capture most attention and value.

Better tools give us leverage, but art is defined by its humanity. It wants a human signature and a point of view machines can't replicate. In the future, art becomes even more personal, participatory, and defined by its human lore than individual masterpieces. Art will be bodies of work with novel aesthetic frameworks.

Not all 8 billion of us will make our living from traditional art, but creation will be central to our lives. Local art becomes valuable via experience and presence and not global scale. Human art becomes an artisanal good with unique value. Making something meaningful and being valued for it is always how humans find purpose.

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4) Community: 8 billion local creators

The dominant non-utilitarian work in the gentle utopia will be what I call "local social craft." The real opportunity isn't everyone sitting at home making art. It's everyone going back to building community. The future we think of as an artist's utopia may actually be a community builder's utopia.

Kevin Kelly's "1000 True Fans" is the digital equation for the online creator economy, but it becomes impossible to fulfill if literally everyone is an "artist." Where do we get long tail distribution? At the local level. The solution is sub-scale. My coffee shop only competes against the neighborhood coffee shops.

The “creator economy” accommodates 8 billion creators when what they’re creating is local community. Robots can make products, but humans still make the connections. It's about creating context for people to connect and experience things together. Coffee shops, bookstores, town squares, libraries, theaters are the "third spaces" where community happens. You may not make a living selling paintings at Sotheby's but you could be a local caricaturist or host paint nights.

Community work is the relational labor. We feel fulfilled when we earn our connection to people. So we're going back to old times when your value was tied not only to your "useful" skills but to your integrated role within the community.

5) Stewardship: who controls the robot army?

If humans remain in charge and robots don't overthrow us entirely, someone has to decide what the robot army does. Stewardship includes leadership, management, governance, politics, even institutional investing. (Marc Andreessen has said investing could be one of the last jobs, and it’s really not a crazy thought).

These decisions about which AI systems to deploy and regulate and how, and whether to share them internationally ultimately also determines global power.

When everyone has the same tools, stewards become curators of possibilities, choosing which problems to prioritize and how to solve them and really which futures to pursue. This creates a stewardship dilemma: the bold risk-takers who champion technological frontiers may also steer us in the wrong direction.

AI makes recommendations, but who's responsible for the outcomes? Even if AI could make perfect decisions, would people accept them? We want leaders who can be moved by emotion as well as reason and those who understand that the best decision on paper isn't always right for people. The leaders of major AI companies today will be the most critical stewards of our collective future.

The Entrepreneurial Layer

Entrepreneurship is how some people will approach any of the 5 types of work, creating new value rather than working within existing systems. You can be an entrepreneur in trades (starting a service business), research (founding a lab), art (creating a style), community (creating new spaces), or stewardship (running for office, launching a fund).

The brutal market economics that govern art will govern innovation in every category. A few big companies will still capture most value, and no longer from always having superior AI models but more often from figuring out how to control the ecosystems that make AI useful (the mature play). These winners then become the almighty kingdoms of the post-AI world. The 'app' arena will be more decentralized, especially in community and trades where local matters more.

We'll see the opposite trend too: decentralized tools (software made for us by us) and personalized tools created by a non-professional class of software creators — the modern craftsmen creating nice-to-haves that could become need-to-haves. But the power laws don’t cease here either. As always, the best of everything still accumulates attention and power.

The entrepreneurial urge to create something new or make something better will be as vital in the gentle singularity as it is today. But it will be hard as ever.

The Gentle Utopia?

When does all this happen? The digital transformation could unfold over decades while the physical world transformation takes centuries (but this is the debate).

We talk about AI making things simpler but fail to acknowledge that it creates new kinds of complexity too. New efficiencies inevitably create new bottlenecks. New AI systems need new oversight mechanisms. New capabilities create new risks requiring new management. The gentle singularity is a job shift.

The five jobs are more than survivor jobs. They capture more value precisely because everything else gets cheaper. When we automate the cognitive, the physical and relational become scarce. When we automate the routine, the exceptional gets repriced. The plumber may have higher status than the consultant and the community organizer may be more valuable than the data analyst. Local beats global in ways we haven't seen since before the internet.

Technology follows a predictable path: first it's a luxury for the rich, then it’s ubiquitous and cheap, and then the human version becomes the luxury. It goes like this: handmade goods to mass production to artisanal craft and back again. Live music to recorded music and back again. Humans doing what robots can becomes the ultimate luxury good. Rather than asking what will humans do for meaning, ask what meaningful work remains valuable for humans to do.

AI kings promise us an artist's utopia but we're not retreating to pure creativity and we're not all becoming artists either. We're maturing as participants in creation ecosystems where we're no longer the only thinkers and doers and no longer the best at both. If we want to compete at scale, we’ll have to play harder and smarter and faster. If we want to feel needed, we'll have to go local.

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More essays: The Relationship Is The Job, Media and Machines, Make Something Heavy, The Aesthetic Is The Art Now, Man’s Pursuit of Greatness Is the Pursuit of a Great Film.

Before going full-time as an artist in 2023, Dipa spent years as a software engineer at Figma while nurturing an artistic practice, starting with digital illustration and expanding into painting and murals. From her Brooklyn studio, she now creates ethereal, abstract works in acrylics and large-scale murals for companies like TikTok. Her recent "Traversing" series explores carving your own path through uncertainty and reinvention.

I asked Dipa 30 questions spanning everything from her creative process to theories on life. She reflects on transitioning from tech to art, how immigrant family creativity flows through generations, why she lov…

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The myth of progress is that efficiency always wins. First, we automate the hands. Then we automate the head. With each technological wave, what was once skilled human labor becomes infrastructure. We love to predict the future belongs to solo geniuses with infinite leverage, aided by armies of machines running themselves.

This begs the obvious question: What remains when machines surpass us at manual and cognitive work? When do we prefer a flawed, imperfect human instead of a perfect machine — or an infinite number of them?

We’re just beginning to ponder how much we still need people and how to value them. In this pursuit, we point to traits like curiosity, creativity, willpower, attention, agency, and taste. Ok yes, these will matter. But the traits of individual brilliance won’t be sufficient for our needs. There are roles we want humans to play, the ones that make us valuable to each other beyond any single trait or skill.

I call this the third labor: Relational Labor.1

Relational lab…

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War and peace. Faith and reason. Labor and capital. What’s the duality of our era?

If every era is defined by a binary, ours is shaped by the fusion of two: Media and Machines — once distinct forces that have collapsed into a single living system that governs what gets built, what breaks through, and what defines our reality.

Machines used to master logic and media used to monopolize attention. The two have now merged into a Möbius strip of mutual reinforcement where media creates machines creates media. The more I look at what’s happening in tech and our world at large, the more conviction I gain that the media-machine singularity is the operating system of our age.

The birth of the superorganism

Social networks were the first superorganisms of the media-machine fusion. They redrew the blueprint of creation and culture. Along the way they became our cities and economies and gods. And now, two decades later, the “attention economy” has swallowed whole the traditional one.

The medium is the message is the machine

AI is just the next evolution of the media-machine fusion, on a grander scale and set to evolve so much faster. LLMs have ingested the entire user-generated internet we built, and more, and have became the Ouroboros of code and culture.

Marshall McLuhan was ever prescient:

In the age of language models, the medium is the message — is the machine.

Natural language has become both interface and infrastructure now. The old divisions have vanished so that to build is to write is to build again. These hybrid superorganisms thrive on reciprocal nourishment: Feed their media half and their machine capabilities grow; starve their machine needs and their cultural influence withers.

We call our AI ambitions instruments of 'progress' but are we accelerating toward greater civilization or just a new Facebook? Is OpenAI just another FAANG-shaped god for the new era? The answer is either yes, or yes and.

Reality engineering

We’re living in Baudrillard’s hyperreality, where the simulations are more real than reality. Eventually everything legible will get eaten by the media-machine complex. Then the only remaining “alpha” will be what resists digitization and can’t be priced in: off-grid experience, instinct, volatility — what I call the unmodelable edge. What does this look like? Like a jazz improvisation in an underground bar, inside jokes between old friends, like a mythical collection of PDFs that hold humanity’s greatest secrets, or deep state and deep company secrets.

But that’s fragile too, because as soon as anything is observed or acknowledged, it’ll get modeled. It’s the inverse of the “tree falls in forest” parable: we won’t ask if it happened unseen but if it still matters once it’s been seen by everyone. To escape total immersion we’ll have to be defiant or be owners. The final human edge will be in controlling the machine or just keeping your distance.1

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The alchemy of modern attention

The great paradox of the media-machine singularity is that the systems that grant us godlike leverage also drown us in algorithmic slop.2 The dead internet theory earns its name as the retreat to trust begins. Legacy media fractures as personality cults rise and the real stories migrate to group chats and fringe blogs.

We start to wonder if we’re still creating for people or machines that feed them? (At some point, Substack gave me an option to block ChatGPT and the like from “training” on my essays, so I did. At what point does that become foolish of me?)

Capital has surrendered too. VC funds all but operate like media companies and increasingly invest in them. When founders, athletes, and kings alike are jostling for the same mic, you realize even fame, money, and power need marketing now. A product without myth and a funding round without a podcast tour go unseen. Manifestos and TBPN are the new minimum.

There’s an urgency to capture attention now— the last chance to “lock-in.”

The new game is barbell-shaped: it’s high-gloss performance for audience capture or deep craft as slow rebellion, and little in between (unless you already have cred, in which case slick-indie sells too). Attention first, product second, if at all. But, I have to remind you — the building still matters. It just takes more now.

The new maker’s manifesto

YC’s famed doctrine, "make something people want" and its cult of the technical founder is timeless, yet could now read as quaint. Today, the making and the wanting must be engineered simultaneously. That too, not just the wanting of ‘users’ you talk to directly, but of the machines that will inevitably talk to them on your behalf too. The most ambitious and strategic ones will try their best at both.

Every organization will now operate as half-media, half-machine. Every media company will have a head of machines and every machine company will have a head of media. Call it the media-machine singularity of business, the hybrid imperative.

Tactically, let’s call it The Anu Principle … Anu’s Theory, Anu’s Law (critical apostrophe).

“Attention guys” are the new engineers — the new unicorn hires — while engineers have become the skilled tradesmen. Idea guys, however emboldened they may now be, are still only as valuable as their ability to finish a product (not just start it with a vibe-coded prototype), and their ability to get distribution.

This singularity requires new organizational DNA.

Lean teams and AI-agents-as-staff will only do so much, and mostly for the sake of efficiency. We’ll need to fundamentally reimagine what makes good media and good machines — in function, form, and faith — and who’s best fit to build them.34

The builder’s role will evolve from just technical architect to applied polymaths weaving machines and media into civilization-shaping sculptures. Every engineering decision will be a cultural act and every narrative choice will have technical impact. Brilliant engineers will have no choice but to find storytellers.

I’m convinced the renaissance mind is set to return, this time not as dilettante supported solely by kings and patrons but as armed philosopher, wielding systems fluency and cultural intelligence equally to great effect inside private and public enterprises alike. The requisites: IQ, EQ, agency, taste, and a will to brute-force your way into the frame. I’m betting the media-machine singularity will give us some of the most iconic, powerful, hybrid artists we’ve ever seen.

The great work of our time

McLuhan’s axiom endures: “first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us” — but faster now as the media-machine superorganism rewires us at scale. And these machines optimize for transmission over truth. They generate coherence, real or not, and wrap it in messages convincing enough to make you nod along.

This raises three unavoidable crucibles:

1. Infinite production demands infinite care — every algorithm’s output becomes someone’s input and every generated phrase someone’s truth.

2. Transmission and virality without virtue isn’t progress but social and cultural vandalism — and this burns through meaning to fuel empty engagement.

3. Our ultimate test will be one of technical mastery, editorial skill, and judgment — the courage to feed the machine something better than its own reflex.5

The questions shift from what can scale to what should. The great work of our time: to make what matters and cultivate the desire for what’s worth wanting at all.

If media and machines have fused into one great engine of scale, what stands opposite it? Man’s search for meaning. But in an age of extremes, even meaning must market itself to remain relevant. We like to think it waits patiently in our private lives — but I suspect that’s wishful thinking. Meaning too must earn its keep.6

Whether you build products, tell stories, direct capital, or curate culture, you are now both architect and artifact of this age. The media-machine complex will metabolize and manifest whatever we feed it, then spit it back out for you to binge. So feed it carefully.

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Related essays: The Aesthetic Is The Art Now, Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley, Man’s Pursuit of Greatness Is the Pursuit of a Great Film, Rise of the Software Creator.

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I’ve also been thinking a lot about what makes creation meaningful, and I’ve landed on a timely thesis: In the age of slop, craft is rebellion.

This series, The Craft, is a multi-format experiment I’m hosting here, all about the art of making things, and what makes the maker, too.

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We instinctively tie weight to value.

Gold is solid. Wood is dense. And back when we still printed things on paper, a heavy stapler was a luxury.1 If something is heavy, we assume it matters. And often it does. Weight signals quality, durability, presence, permanence.

Even the objects we choose reflect this. At first, we buy cheap, lightweight furniture—easy to build, easy to trash. But eventually we want weight. A solid oak table. A leather armchair. Something that’s built to last. Heavy things comfort us—a weighted blanket stills the body and a heavy door makes a home feel secure.

Winners of major awards almost always say the same thing as they lift the trophy: ‘Wow! It’s so heavy.’ As though the weight itself validates the achievement. Simple logic: Light achievements beget light awards. Heavy achievements beget heavy awards.

We accept this in the physical world.

But online, we forget.

The internet is (mostly) a machine for light things.

The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It runs on the internet—powered by social media and fueled by mass appeal, addicted to its own speed. It thrives on endless scrolls and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for intention, patience, or anything but production.

It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. (Make slop if you have to.) Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here and now, time has become a tax. And so, we oblige—everyone does.

We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

AI now promises faster results and without the same reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards. No one dreams of merely pushing a button to generate their magnum opus. The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count, and what gives it weight.2

Yes, there’s a range from light to heavy and not all light things are bad. An entire economy thrives on lightness. Tweets, memes, breaking news, and celebrity gossip shape culture. But movement isn’t meaning and a million views isn’t a pound of significance. Light things shape culture but rarely us.

Creation is a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can, a writer wrestles an idea into clarity. You don’t just make heavy things. You become someone who can.

Many light things don’t add up to one heavy thing.

So many creators start in the shallow pool of some algorithm’s grip until, inevitably, they go searching for something heavier. From short-form to long-form and timely to a little less timely and to timeless. From building in public to locking in to solitude, obsession, deep work. To create a book, a film, an album, a company—something that stands alone.

No matter how many you stack, Tweets and TikToks don’t add up to something heavy. They don’t solidify. At best, they’re a pile of snowflakes, crystally-complex yet ephemeral—beautiful while they’re here and gone before they hit the ground.3

Substack, with its many virtues, finds itself at a crossroads. I’d position it in the midweight creation zone (if used well). Writers stack posts, building up a library of words that starts to feel substantial. It’s good that long-form posts can go viral faster and stick around longer. But it’s still not quite as heavy as writers’ loftiest dreams, at least not yet. Even the most successful Substackers, those who’ve turned newsletters into brands and businesses, start pondering their endgame.

They want to make one really, really good thing. One truly heavy thing. A book. A manifesto. A movie. A media company. A monument. — A masterpiece.4

Not just for the prestige or the money, but for the proverbial "F-U" to ephemerality. For the way it anchors them to something lasting while giving them the freedom to breathe. For the way it sticks in the hearts and minds of other people who encounter it too.

Heavy projects are the lifeblood of creative fulfillment — and creative longevity. And for now, no platform truly offers that kind of weight on its own. Platforms are built to amplify, not anchor.5

You’re either making in light mode or in heavy mode.

Light mode is fast and iterative, producing work that’s quick to make but just as quick to fade. It’s the mode of rapid experiments, side quests, and prolific posting. Heavy mode is slower and more deliberate and intentional (it’s often hermit mode). It’s the mode of deep work that builds over time and carries lasting weight.

Some go straight for the heavy thing: first-shot building the billion-dollar startup, writing the world-changing book, and recording the defining album. Or, in less relative terms: things that will stand on their own and stand the test of time. Weight is lindy.6 Others build up slowly to the heavy things: essays before the book, short films before the feature, prototypes before the big product (maybe a few silly ‘GPT wrappers’ before the serious one). Lightness has its virtues in that it helps keep you fresh and get in the reps and work your way up to the heavy thing.

At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating, and feel lost. Post–heavy thing people have crossed that threshold. They’ve made something of substance that feels like it, gets respect, inspires, and becomes a solid base to build on. And it shows. They move with confidence and calm (but this feeling doesn’t always last forever.)7 Your gut will tell you what state you’re in. And quite often the cycle repeats.

No one wants to stay in light mode forever. Sooner or later everyone starts gravitating toward heavy mode. Whatever you consider your ‘life’s work’ will be heavy, and finding the balance of light and heavy along the way is the game.8

Note: heavy doesn’t have to mean “big.” Heavy can be small, niche, hard to scale. What I’m talking about is more like density. It’s about what is defining, meaningful, durable.

You feel like an imposter when you only make light things.

Everyone calls themselves a creator now. It’s the default title of the moment, the identity of an era. But does everyone who claims it earnestly feel it?

Telling everyone they’re a creator has just invented a new strain of imposter syndrome. Because bing called a creator doesn’t make you one or make you feel like one. When you’ve made something heavy—something that stands on its own—you don’t need validation. You just know. The weight is its own reward.

It’s not that most people can’t make heavy things. It’s that they don’t notice that they aren’t. Lightness has its virtues—it pulls us in, subtly, innocently, whispering, 'Just do things.' The machine rewards movement, and so we keep going, shuffling our feet to collect all the badges. One day we look up and realize we’ve been running in place.

And then you feel it: a quiet, gnawing hollowness that for all the making, maybe nothing has truly been made. Why does it feel bad to stop posting after weeks of consistency? Because the force of your work instantly drops to zero. It was all motion, no mass. Momentum without weight. 99% dopamine, near-zero serotonin, no trace of oxytocin. This is the contemporary creator’s dilemma—the contemporary generation’s dilemma.

You don’t feel like a true creator because you haven’t made anything heavy, and deep down, you know light things don’t count. Your output is high but your imprint is low. You ship but you do not build. You call yourself a creator but what have you made that could survive a month offline? A year? A decade? If you stopped posting tomorrow, would anything remain? Creating for 24-hour cycles isn’t the freedom or leverage it’s sold as. It is just renting out your time.

The weight of what we make matters.

Creative people are restless souls forever chasing the horizon until they’ve made something substantial. We spend our lives crafting weighted blankets for ourselves—something heavy enough to anchor our ambition and quiet our minds.

Weight is tangible in the physical world—the place we should care about and create more for than we have of late even if it’s harder to scale. Working with your hands, with weight and shape and dimension holds an abundance of untapped virtue and value. Online, by nature, weight is harder to find and to hold on to, and it’s only getting harder in a world where it feels like anyone can make anything.

But it is just as imperative.

People ask, "What are you working on?" They’re really asking: What’s your endgame? (It’s one of my favorite questions, too.)

My answer is simple but not easy:

Make something heavy.

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Related essays: The Aesthetic Is The Art Now, Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley, Your dreams demand your best hours, Pursuits that can’t scale, Status limbo.

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In the spirit of walking the walk, sharing one heavy creative project on my mind below. If you’ve read this far and want to support me in such an endeavor, DMs open. 🙏