I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word

There’s a pattern that Facebook (well, Meta — you know, those folks behind Instagram and WhatsApp and the direct enabling of the Rohingya genocide ) has been following for decades now that everyone in the worlds of policy and regulation and journalism seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding. So I wanted to take a moment to explain it, clearly and simply, in hopes that this will at

Every year, for 25 years, I’ve written on the observance of this anniversary. Some years, it’s been for me, some years it’s been for the people who’ve been with me along the way. Some years, I didn’t know why I was even doing it any more. But this year, for the first time in a long time, I can feel exactly what story I want to tell. Right from the day of the attacks, that evening , I remember peop

So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level. Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies . Now, what I mean here are peo

When I talked about the rise of Cancer Capital , I mentioned that it represents a massive shift from how venture capital has worked over the years. But my conversations in recent years with people in tech, and especially with those outside the industry, reveal that most folks have no idea just how huge that shift has been. It's easy to illustrate exactly how extreme things have gotten just by usin

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore. There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no o

These days, the conversation in tech and business, and in a lot of society, is still all AI, all the time. And one of the most fundamental questions boils down to: How do you get people to change what they’re doing in regard to AI? For people who (understandably) have moral or ethical objections to the many harms caused by Big AI, there’s the challenge of how to drive action while lacking the reso

For years, I’ve wanted to have a standalone version of Apple’s Touch ID authentication feature for my Mac, but without having to use an Apple keyboard. (I generally like their keyboards, but my daily driver keyboard these days is a big clicky mechanical beast.) I’d gone down various dead ends of trying to find substitutes, and even checked out the efforts where people had ripped apart expensive Ap

The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better Docu

One aspect of strategy that’s been largely lost in the tech industry in recent years is how to compete against platforms, since the major tech companies have gotten so big that markets are no longer competitive. However, the AI market is still early enough, and users and society are still angry enough, that the Big AI companies can lose. But for them to lose, everybody else in the ecosystem has to

“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.” That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new playe

If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr . What you might not know is… why? Here’s the TL;DR: Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era, w