Nate Sullivan

I find software and technology very interesting, and I’ve worked at related startup companies for most of my career. But I’ve become less and less interested in what most companies are building, and definitely less interested in what the companies I’ve gotten to work for have been building. For a long time, it’s been hard to explain what I find so uninteresting and occasionally distasteful about the direction of things. While there are plenty of well documented ill-effects of technology to talk about, even working on the inside (albeit not in consumer facing scenarios most of the time) it was hard to come up with a quasi-unified theory of what was poisoning everyone’s brain and the larger culture.

Then, I figured it out. I’m sure other people have, and have probably written about it more eloquently, but for my own mental health I thought I might try to articulate it here.

The theme, over and over again, is an escape from responsibility. At this point, almost every idea seems to be an attempt to take an existing task, or job, or function, and reinvent where the person who gets paid for doing it is somehow insulated from whatever effort or accountability existed in previous versions of said work. This is not a comprehensive list, but if you just follow the key innovations of the Millennial Internet Experience, this pattern becomes pretty obvious.

Napster: you get music, for free, from other people, through a platform that facilitates this exchange but takes no accountability for it, and denies that it exists to facilitate this exchange

Facebook: originally built for connection, Facebook quickly evolved into an information platform, where it distributed and actively promoted things to you that you would normally get from newspapers, television, magazines, etc. without any accountability for what those things were, whether they were stolen, false, scams, etc.

YouTube: exact same removal of accountability for distribution and promotion, but the main focus was on taking control of distribution rights from people who made video/film/tv content, and then negotiating a profit share with those owners from a position with all the leverage (i.e., “we made a million dollars off your movie, would you like $20k or not”)

Crypto: anonymous, unregulated money, mostly to commit crimes with

Gig Work: we don’t have employees, we just make money off of dashers and drivers and day laborers and everything else, but these people are not our responsibility in any way

Metaverse: what if there were no building permits, no infrastructure, hell, no physical environment at all? Everything is pretend, and pretend things don’t have rules!

LLMs: a little bit of YouTube (normalizing theft), and a little bit of Facebook (“we didn’t do anything, it’s the algorithm, here’s how you can nudge it slightly, so honestly this is actually mostly your fault”)

Which brings us to “Agents”. We’ve had automation forever — we used to call it “programming”, kids — but never for one second did we think that we weren’t responsible for automations we programmed and then deployed. Even for things more complicated than giant if/then decision trees, where our program “decided” something, like who was in a picture, or how aggressive to be in a board game simulation, obviously the guy who set all of those parameters and thresholds (and, in our weaker moments, random number generators) was actually responsible for what the software did, right?

… right?

I should have known, given the history of technology and my proximity to it, what everyone’s fever dream would be with something like this — total lack of any accountability whatsoever. After all, you can dodge a ton of responsibility by positioning yourself correctly as a “platform” that connects two sides of a transaction where you don’t actually do anything, but ultimately there’s also a limited amount you can claim to do, and thus charge money for. But what if you owned a piece of software that could do everything a person can do in a given situation, and was understood to be completely independent from you, but couldn’t be held accountable like one? Obviously you can’t be held accountable for the actions of a completely independent, decision-making entity working on behalf of someone else, right?

… right?

The utility of any of this has always been vaguer and murkier than the utility of not being responsible or accountable for anything your product does, even when your product is out there doing stuff in the real world. This isn’t a technology innovation as much as a societal one, and from a societal perspective, it’s a bad innovation. A world where no one is responsible for anything is a bad world, we know this, we’ve experienced it, and yet capital has this absolute obsession with getting itself there. It’s literally all they care about now.

How do you get people to accept an obviously crappier social dynamic, though? Well, go back to the list.

Napster: All the music that was made because people could pay for it — well, you can have it now! For free!

Facebook: See what your friends are up to! Maybe get famous!

YouTube: Watch and share whatever you want whenever you want! Maybe get famous!

Crypto: Commit crimes! Get rich by doing nothing!

Gig Work: Be your own boss!

Metaverse: Be what you wish you were, not what you are!

LLMs: Pretend to talk to someone who knows you! Generate tons of plausible looking stuff with no effort!

These are all carrots used to make it impossible to say no to a new arrangement (even if that new arrangement is logically dependent on the old arrangement like Napster was and YouTube probably is), just because the value is so high. Some of these carrots are better than others, and you can see their impact in the uptake of things. Crypto is sort of languishing in its normal niche of criminals and speculators because the mass market doesn’t really want to commit crimes or spend their money on confusing, erratic assets. The metaverse failed because it can’t actually deliver the experience it promised. YouTube took over the world because (a) an endless pipeline of every video you’d ever want to see is awesome, and (b) it inserted itself into the way video makes money, but didn’t completely undercut it right away, so there are still good videos to be had.

LLMs and other generative AI tools are testing their proposition now. I’d say it’s a mixed bag; the number of people who want to pretend their computer loves them is more than I’d like to see, but not high enough to build an empire. The benefit of shooting out effortless work paste at the click of a button is immediately and viscerally countered by the fact that you also get this crap from your bosses, co-workers, clients, etc., and in general people absorb more than they send so the sentiment appears to be pretty negative, and getting worse.

So back to Agents. In their own way, agents are supposed to remove most or all of the responsibility for taking action in the world, which is an absolutely massive societal change that, honestly, I think almost no one really wants. It doesn’t matter if an agent goes from 65% success to 95% success, the entire thing hinges on the fundamentals of who is responsible for the action being taken. If that were addressed to people’s satisfaction, there are a million things you’d accept a 65% success rate for. If it’s not addressed to people’s satisfaction, 99.95% is not going to be good enough, because these things are computers and are going to do trillions of things, which means it’s going to break fifty billion times or whatever and all those people are going to demand recourse.

If the capital and companies pushing Agent Society so hard had a clever answer for this, or were clearly running some sort of Manhattan-Project-style effort to figure one out, I’d probably be really interested in working on agents and both the technology and society behind them. But they don’t (otherwise we’d be hearing about it), and they aren’t working on it because they don’t care. The purpose of agents is to remove responsibility and accountability as efficiently as possible. If that means pushing it to you, or the government, or the legal system, so be it, but those chips are going to fall where they may, because like YouTube, the appeal of Agent Society is going to be so overwhelming to people and businesses that they’re going to accept it.

Now, you won’t be surprised to hear that I happen to think this is wrong. Not unlike the immediate negative counter response you get from sending lazy LLM slop to coworkers, where everyone ELSE uses LLMs to send YOU lazy LLM slop that you have to deal with, accountability-free Agents make you feel the pain of their existence pretty quickly. When you send an agent to buy something, and it buys the wrong thing with your money, are you getting a refund? Will the agent do it? Will it battle with another agent? What if it fails? What if it lies? What if it buys MORE stuff with your money? Who is paying for all of this?

Just keep following this down the obvious rabbit hole. Maybe you have to approve every purchase. Okay, fine, but obviously that cuts into the productivity benefit of this. And in that case… what else do you need to approve? Does it bring you hundreds of stupid little approvals? Does it go down stupid paths that burn compute, or worse, your actual real-world resources? If you need to approve while it’s asleep, what do you do? What if one approval is necessary at the very beginning of a time-sensitive project, and you leave your agent unattended? Were you aware of this? Is anyone responsible for making you aware of it? Not today!

Again, you could go on with this forever, and a world where we’re trying to figure this out or solve it in a more realistic way than “the model will be so good it will figure out how to solve it” is a world where I probably want to work on this stuff. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not why there’s such a maniacal focus on this particular set of technologies. “The model will become so good…” is the only real answer from the industry precisely because it’s the only one where they can all wipe their hands of responsibility and pass it off to something else — the technology itself. They’ll just own it, and rent it. You can argue with your computer about whose fault the bad outcomes are.

If it’s not obvious, (and I suspect it’s not) this is not an anti-AI rant. I have a lot of specific AI beef, but ultimately that comes with any technology. Instead, it’s almost just a sense of melancholy over the direction of my industry, and the realization that a lot of my friends and colleagues just don’t really care about any of this. For them, there’s no pattern here, no real intent — it’s just progress, and where the animal spirits have taken the world. You can be anti-AI, or anti-Big Tech, or whatever, and there’s a mental model for that just because so many people are angry and exhausted by the world today, and the world is dominated by a couple of key technology players. But the lack of character in the industry — not just outright morals, but like, I dunno, a shared sense of responsibility not just for world-ending science fiction scenarios, but basic decency in how what we do will impact the society we were able to grow up in — is just gross, and as somebody now in my mid-40s I can tell you that it’s slowly been getting worse for a very, very long time. It’s not that things shouldn’t evolve or change. It’s that changing them thoughtlessly, or making the consequences of those changes somebody else’s problem without telling them, is just a crappy thing to do, and that should be obvious.

After two decades of consistently doing so, I haven’t worked for a tech startup since the Summer of 2025. I’ve looked at a lot of jobs since then, and to be honest, the vast, vast majority of them feel gross and uninspiring. It turns out that being desperate to make ends meet really helps you look past a lot, and in that way, not being desperate has been a huge problem for me. Maybe that problem will get “fixed”, and good old “there but for the grace of God go I” American society will kick me in the crotch, as it often does to so many people. In that case, I’ll be back to making landing pages for AI-powered debt collection call centers or whatever because I can’t afford not to, and life will go on.

I’ll probably have to delete this post, though, if I’m being honest.

Maybe I should just continue endlessly posting societal questions that were answered thirty years ago by The Simpsons. It's a rich vein to mine, honestly.

At any rate, here's Spencer Pratt, a reality TV "actor"/producer who is almost my exact same age but who doesn't appear to have ever had a job of any sort, running for mayor of Los Angeles, because why not?

“On the phone a few minutes later, Pratt sounds relaxed, candidly acknowledging that he doesn’t have an “answer to every question. That’s why I go around and I try to talk to people and hear what people’s issues are.” He’s a neophyte politician but seems to have a natural ease when talking with voters. “I don’t ever feel like I can get trapped because I don’t know the answer to something. I’ll tell somebody, ‘I don’t have the answer to that. I’ll look into it. I’ll get back to you.’"

We've done this. Not just the whole "elect the reality TV guy because we're bored" thing, but more importantly, the "I am tired of dissatisfying answers, let's get some satisfying ones" protest votes. There's another line in that Post editorial where two voters agree that "at least he's change". Sure! Why not vote for a tree stump? The current mayor is not a tree stump! No mayor has EVER been a tree stump!

But don't take my word for it. Listen to Springfield Sanitation Commissioner Ray Patterson. I know we're going to continue falling for this over and over again, forever, because that's just what we do. But every once in a while I like to remind people that it is, technically, a choice we make.

Sometimes I find it hard to motivate myself to put together my thoughts about society into thoughtful, coherent arguments simply because it's unnecessary — all you really need to do is watch the first 9 or so seasons of The Simpsons and you'll understand everything around you.

Do the people hate the movies? Maybe. Do the people hate Mister Burns? Probably, I guess? But it doesn't really matter, because they definitely hate movies that reflect everything they hate about Mister Burns.

On a completely related note, this exact scenario is happening all over the place as rich, powerful people lecture new graduates about artificial intelligence technology they, in all likelihood, understand very little about. Booing a commencement speaker isn't the kind of thing that gets me riled up one way or another, but I think the media reactions to this are a useful illustration of how everyone is interpreting what this kind of thing means, and I think they happen to be wrong about it.

For one, I don't think a lot of these kids are mad about AI taking jobs. I certainly don't think the idea, or the ceaseless messaging of it helps, but the idea of a career is still a weird, ill-formed thought when you're 22-ish and sitting at your graduation. Jobs come and go, and it's not like it's ever been especially easy for a new graduate to just jump into a job, let alone one they don't despise.

But I do think almost all normal people are absolutely done with being told how everything is going to work by a pretty small group of people who (a) don't have to live inside this new reality, whatever it ends up being, because they already have enough money to build whatever kind of life they want, and (b) never face any consequences for being wrong about these predictions, which they're constantly making. People like that talk a certain way, and it sounds like this:

“You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”

This is an insane way to talk to anyone, but an especially insane way to talk to a bunch of people who just spent four years on college diplomas. Schmidt sounds like a third-world dictator, and if you've forgotten, those guys are not usually very popular. But I bet you're not allowed to boo him in most of the places he talks, so maybe he was caught off-guard by the reaction.

“Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with.”

I'm sure he did. And while I appreciate the sentiment, Eric Schmidt is not debating anything with these people — he's lecturing to them while they have to sit there and wait to get their diplomas! And just so it's clear I'm not picking on Eric here, this is how all these guys talk. Yes, they're excited about the technology, but much more than that, they're just obsessed with getting you to build your life around it. In case you're too young or have forgotten, we had lunatics pushing internet adoption back in the 90s, too. But that excitement was almost entirely powered by possibilities (and, not coincidentally, a bunch of non-profit, open source protocols and technologies owned by no one) and really didn't require anyone to do anything they didn't want to do. For every Comic Book Guy arrogantly telling you that you'd be buying your groceries on your computer, there were hundreds of nerds just excited to show you how a message board worked, or who were happy to simply use the internet without you.

This is what brings up people's guards, and eventually turns to anger. There is just an underlying lack of real, organic belief in this technology by its biggest advocates, and you can smell it a mile a way. It's a bunch of already rich guys telling you the world needs to change in a direction that benefits them even more, and that you really, really need to make it happen.

If your hand tightens around your wallet when you hear that kind of thing, no one should blame you.

To downsize, or not to downsize? That is the question, apparently.

See, my theory is that this is because tasers are real, and Coinbase is not. Real things — workers required. Pretend things? Sure, agents. Do everything with agents. Or don't! Who cares?

Struggling to make software work is a really specific type of experience, and you either get that mental place or you don't. As an objectively poor developer, I avoid writing code whenever possible, which is why I spend a lot of time using stuff like Bubble. But I'm not vibe-coding — every time my application doesn't do what it was supposed to, it's because of me. And when I actually figure out what's wrong, and change it, it stays that way and I move onto something else.

I think one of the reasons I've found LLM-based vibe-coding so unsatisfying has been the fact that it fundamentally alters this experience. If you're purely looking to make a computer do something, and you're not very good at that (I qualify for that designation), I get that just asking for it to happen a couple times may be a faster and ultimately better way to make the computer do it.

(It's also entirely possible that it's not faster and/or not better — this is a different discussion, but an important one for another time.)

But... it's absolutely not flexing the same muscles as building with a deterministic system. It's not using them less, it's actually not using them at all. If you've never flexed them, you might not notice. You might have a long back and forth with a chatbot, iterating on some idea, and think you've entered the sort of "flow state" your developer friends have talked about. You have not. Seriously, I am telling you, you have totally not done this. You may be in some other sort of state, and maybe that state has value, or maybe it's the future of work, or maybe you're just a guy hitting "refresh" and hoping for a different outcome, but you are not doing the thing.

Again, it's not about code. It's about systems, learning them, altering them, and ultimately mastering them. You interact with a lot of systems with code, and I suck at that, and I know that I suck at it because I've done it more than I probably should have, and I've been evaluated and coached and critiqued (heavily) by people who are really good at it. For me, failure was common, but success did happen sometimes and it's an unforgettable feeling. When I vibe-code decent stuff, it doesn't feel anything like that.

The Agency Model

The best thing I can compare this sort of thing to is working with an agency. If you've never been able to hire one, suddenly having Claude or whatever at your beck and call is probably thrilling. And sure, you can tell a chatbot to interact with you a certain way, to "partner" with you, or pretend you're pair programming even if you don't know how to program, and it will indulge you. But guess what? So will a lot of agencies. You're the customer, dummy! They'll tell you whatever you want if you let them.

I've had more or less involved roles with different agencies. I've sat there and barked orders, I've been hands off, and I've tried to save money by doing pieces of the work myself. It doesn't matter — asking for stuff is different than figuring out stuff. Really building software is not asking for things; it's doing things and creating iron-clad decision trees for things and tweaking things so that they must do what you want. No one is coming to help you. No one is going to just make it work, especially not your computer.

It doesn't have to be about building apps, either. People configure complex IT or DevOps systems, CRMs, automations, and other stuff this way, and a lot of those people get the same runner's high when they master these systems and bend them to their will.

I can't predict the future. But I can't shake the feeling that regardless of how anyone feels about any given tool, moving these experiences, these journeys, to non-deterministic finger crossing is going to create more problems than it solves. I think there's a reason many of the people most excited about eliminating the journey are people who aren't on it very often.

I've had a lot of fun and done some cool things working at companies that lose more money than they make, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it's the healthiest environment. It is — by definition — an inherently untenable situation, which creates both urgency and nagging sense of existential dread. Maybe you find that motivating (I do, sometimes!), but more often than not I've found it eventually lead to paranoia and panic.

Even weirder, success in this world is often more distorting than failure, because it's so tied to fundraising and valuations. That might seem reasonable enough, until you consider that the first thing is just "someone giving you money with no oversight or rules", and the second thing is using the first thing as proof that you're making progress.

I've been doing this for a long time now, but I've never quite seen an environment like this, where two companies operating entirely inside this sort of business mirror dimension are just throwing billion-dollar-losing haymakers at each other in the hopes of being... declared the winner, I guess?

As of this post in March of 2026, it seems clear to me that Anthropic is clearly winning the perception war. Maybe that's because they're inherently less shady (although possibly more fundamentally deluded) than OpenAI, or maybe it's because they were smart enough to focus on selling to non-users (business people) instead of today's broke-ass consumers. Or maybe it's that OpenAI has been around longer, burning money longer, and is simply closer to reaching the logical, obvious end state of a company like this where it starts flailing around and trying to monetize things people only like because they're free.

Either way, Anthropic is "winning", and that means OpenAI is "losing". Are they both losing unsustainable amounts of money? Yes! Are they both relying on fundamental changes to society that don't appear to be happening yet (mass AI adoption and huge productivity improvements across white-collar work), while ignoring fundamental changes to society that do appear to be happening right in front of us (the internet it needs to function/improve turning into a cesspool of AI spam)? Most certainly, yes!

But... Anthropic is winning, you see. They're WINNING! Claude is COOL, man! It's got momentum! Have you made your crappy single page custom notes app, yet?

(Oh, I have.)

Look, a lot of this is fine. Startups need to spend money, take big swings, and figure it out later. I myself have advocated for this many times, in fact. But this whole era is taking the concept beyond even my wild desires for the ambitions of venture backed companies, largely because I never envisioned the entire economy placing one large combined bet on, essentially, one technology spread out among maybe five companies, two of which have never been in the black for one second and have no clear path to ever getting there and seemingly feel no obligation to even consider the issue.

The "winning the narrative" thing is like "winning free agency" in sports. I get where it comes from, and I get why people get excited, and I get the relevance of the challenge on the actual results of the real games that occur several months later. But we give free agency the level of primacy it gets because we're bored and there are no games at the time. We don't just replace the season with it. There are actual games to be played that matter way more!

There's a lot of hand-waving going on with the AI industry, and tech in general right now, for sure. But even when Amazon was sinking money for years and years, they could very clearly and cogently explain that choice to you. The upsides, the downsides, and how if push came to shove they could pivot to making money in a matter of weeks or months.

That's just really different than where we are now. I kinda think the people in charge know that, but the longer this goes on, the less sure I am about it, and the less confident I am in any kind of graceful landing here.

One thing I think a LOT of smart people misunderstand is that the power of computers is always SCALE. Computers are very fast, don't get tired, and they have no shame. If you are smart, you can point those characteristics in useful directions — and people have been doing exactly that for decades.

Large language models — especially the really, really large language models that dominate discourse and investment in 2026 — are definitely an example of this. Computers can't understand things, but they can identify extremely subtle patterns in data sets that are too massive for a person to even comprehend, and then simply respond to inputs as those patterns would. How they use those patterns to formulate output can be tweaked, or adjusted, or even randomized because all of that is just math and computers will never get tired of doing math, no matter what boring or weird or disgusting thing you make them turn that math into.

People respond to patterns too, although people are both much better and much worse at pattern recognition. They're worse because they'll never operate at the scale of a computer network, but at the same time they are vastly better at finding patterns outside of prescribed data sets, or even working with completely unstructured data they've never worked with before.

Basically:

People are slow, but they can be "prompted" by literally anything, including things like feelings, instincts, and other elements of existence that we can't even fully articulate.

Computers are very fast, but you have to structure things for them (you can try to get a computer to structure things, and sometimes with enough patterns to consult it'll figure it out, but it'll miss tons and tons of relationships that are obvious to any person).

There's a huge mistake being made (and frequently published) by even very smart, often technically competent people. That mistake is believing that human thinking is simply this kind of pattern matching done at almost incomprehensible scale, but that if we're able to build software that can do it, we'll have computers that work like people. I'm not a neurologist (or whatever the appropriate discipline is) so I can't prove this point academically, but I have spent most of my time working with software engineers, data scientists, and venture capitalists, so I can tell you that this is exactly the kind of mistake these people have been making their entire careers.

But I'm not here to judge. Instead, I'm here to warn everyone — again — that the world-shaking impact of generative, model-based software ("AI") is not going to be its ability to replace what people do, because despite what everyone is extrapolating, we don't have a ton of evidence that a lot of important work can be done effectively by a pattern matching robot, no matter how much training data it has. I guess anything could happen, but the reason I'm not that interested in it is because "high competence" is not the most likely effect of scale. We didn't see it in cloud computing, social networking, cryptocurrency, or anything else we threw money at.

Instead, the most likely effect of scale is (1) more supply, and (2) more trash. It will probably become very, very, very cheap to get an image of basically anything you can describe generated by a computer using pattern matching. If you're willing to accept VC/hyperscaler-subsidized pricing, we're already there. An entirely separate question is "how good of an image can you get from pattern matching", which depends on everything from what the image is, to how you define "good", to whether you believe in the existence of any sort of intellectual property rights. That question is extremely important if you are looking to replace the actual image creation skills that exist today with cheap, high speed pattern matching, but it's not important at all if the goal involves making tons and tons of pattern-derived middling trash.

And that's the thing! There are many business models that involve leveraging the ability to make middling trash much more quickly and easily than before. The most obvious one is spam, which is both a huge business and something predicated entirely on scale, low-cost, and finding the minimum level of plausibility necessary to work. Sure, spam is also a huge social and economic problem because it exhausts people and erodes trust, but if you make money by making spam that's someone else's problem.

Music & Spam

Music now has a spam problem. More accurately, music's existing spam problem is now exponentially worse, to the point where it's challenging the viability of the entire economic enterprise. Now, I happen to think this will get slowed or resolved simply because there's so much money in music, and it's an industry that isn't new to the idea of protecting its intellectual property. Not all of that money is smart, but I think Spotify + Labels will be better at teaming up to protect their shared interests than an army of small-time grifters.

But there's a lesson here for other industries that might not be as ready to fight spam. This is the challenge that AI will create, and it's much scarier because unlike a lot of AI doom scenarios, it's not speculation or based on extrapolating massive capability improvements that don't exist yet but maybe seem possible if you squint or just raised a Series C. AI tools can generate better spam, more spam, and forms of spam that weren't viable five years ago, and it can do it right now. The spam is stupid, of course, but almost all spam is stupid, so it doesn't matter. In fact, while AI spam is stupid, it's often less stupid than non-AI spam, not because AI is so great but because spam is so bad. It's a legitimate revolution.

Honestly, I think the term "slop" for the AI detritus we're all seeing everywhere is pretty good, so I don't have a lot of pushback on it. But I do think we should remember that in most cases, slop has the same objectives as spam. It's not to replace the work we do, but instead to overwhelm society with scale so it can collect the economic value that ordinarily would go to the superior, "real" product. When spam succeeds, it's because it is so overwhelming that the distinctions between "good" and "merely plausible" go away, and whoever gets more at-bats wins by default. Spam always gets more at-bats than real work, and AI will always get more at bats than real content.

For all of the futurism and noodling about guaranteed income or whatever, there's no real reason to think this technology won't plug into actual, current economic behaviors and systems, and simply find the shortest path to money. That's how capitalism works, especially when unchecked, and the American capitalism of 2026 is more unchecked than any in my lifetime. So maybe AI will iterate for however long it takes to generate music as good as what people make, or to become a useful workflow tool that actually improves the work musicians do (please, please, learn to mix and EQ my tracks for me). But there's no maybe about it that AI will be used to extract value from existing markets at the expense of that market, its buyers, and its sellers by third parties, because it's an incredible tool for that.

It brings me no joy to predict this, but if I'm being honest, I expect this exact type of problem to be the defining legacy of everything we're calling "AI" today.

Some time around my freshman year of college, my Dad's company gave him a phone with Windows CE on it. It quickly became a running joke in my house, because the phone was both kind of incredible, and the dumbest thing in the world. Dad hated it, surely in part because he didn't like the idea of work trying to bother him at home, but also because he was an engineer and the phone was a truly bizarre collection of choices in resource allocation. It had a bunch of Windows-style bells and whistles that made it sort of feel like Windows, but was laughably bad at basically any task you'd ever actually want to do on the phone. It took forever to turn on. It was impossibly slow. Even getting and responding to an email was a huge chore with a fiddly little plastic stylus. If you had asked us in 2002 whether smartphones would take over the world in less than a decade, I think we would have had a good laugh.

The two major shifts that changed that trajectory were the Blackberry, and the iPhone. I never had a Blackberry, but I remember my wife's office giving her one temporarily for some reason, and the difference in philosophy was obvious. I have no idea how many different things the Blackberry did or presumed to do, but it was really, really good at reading and sending short emails. I know this because my wife (at the time) had zero experience doing anything productive on a smartphone — I'm not even sure we knew how to text each other yet — and within a couple hours she looked like a legislative aide trying to push a bill through committee. She was hooked to that thing, to the point that I made her promise not to keep it if they let her. But as a pure messaging product, the Blackberry was a home run because (at least at first) it made vastly better resource prioritization decisions and focused entirely on making the useful experience of triaging emails while on the go better.

The iPhone was an even more impressive achievement because it made Blackberry-level allocation and optimization decisions in service of Microsoft's much more ambitious goal, which was mobile, general purpose computing. And while, without a doubt, there were (and continue to be) amazing hardware innovations that made the iPhone idea work, they were all in service of software that was extraordinarily well-designed and built for the task. Multitouch hardware is cool, but multitouch hardware attached to an entire platform built around pinching and pulling and tapping actually solves many of the problems Windows CE simply stared at blankly and hoped people would accept.

Today, it's easy enough to think about my Dad's old phone (or "Pocket PC", or whatever it was called back then) and think that Microsoft basically had this right and just dropped the ball. But they never actually had it, because their "it" was just "small computers". They could have banged away at that for another twenty years with incrementally better hardware and made the horrendous, Start-menu-clicking Windows CE experience marginally better, but they never actually would have figured out what we have today. They were never going to solve a problem that required transcendently great software because they make shitty software and they don't think that's a problem. Instead, their solution was to push their laughably bad devices (sorry, "partner devices") to corporate customers and try to pressure the world into adopting them. In fact, it's a credit to Microsoft's incredible sales and distribution skills that people like my Dad even had these devices in their hands at all, as they provided almost zero utility, were pretty expensive, and generated absolutely no mainstream, organic demand. They were stupid, fundamentally broken, almost nobody wanted them, and yet through sheer force of dollars and executive desire, they were a real product category and frequently discussed in business media as "the future".

Sound familiar?

"No... it's the children who are wrong."

Ultimately, I think mobile "happened" because the software that powered it and defined the experience for the people using it made those massive leaps. The Blackberry made people realize the "tiny Windows PC" concept was stupid and insufficiently useful, and the iPhone gave people a fundamentally different way to interact with small devices that made them not just usable, but so usable that people became comfortable using them instead of desktops and laptops in many (most?) circumstances. There was no "adoption" problem because the products made obvious sense. In fact, at the enterprise level, the problem was backwards — companies didn't know how to deal with the fact that everyone wanted to use their mobile device for work, and they actually dragged their feet and tried to slow the whole thing down.

One of the massive red flags about this generation of "AI" technology is the increasingly frequent (to the point of being almost constant now) reference to those pesky "adoption" problems. I get a little salty about "adoption" because it's the kind of thing people complain to Product Marketing about, and feel like my team should be able to fix, or have prevented in the first place. And sure, every so often, there's an awareness or education problem, and that's something we can tackle. But much more frequently, people are aware of what we want them to do, and they do know how to do it. They just don't want to do it, dislike the process of doing it, or don't think it's worth the effort. As a last ditch effort, I can always argue with them about it, but the honest truth is that if you're arguing, you're losing. We probably just made something no one wants or needs, or maybe even something that is actively bad.

Windows CE had adoption problems, too. I guess we could have written op-eds about how the world of 2002 needed to "transform itself" into a "mobile-first" world — I assume people wrote these, honestly — but none of that actually happened because the world wasn't going to reorganize itself to mitigate the problems of new, unproven products caused by shitty, uncreative software. In reality, the world only grudgingly adapted once transcendently great software made these products shockingly, undeniably useful for interacting with the world around them. Adaptation is a reaction, after all. Businesses don't preemptively adapt to anything unless they really enjoy wasting time and money.

If generative AI actually matters, its utility or ease of use will force the changes today's investors and consultants are insistent that we make ahead of time — a trail to be blazed, so to speak, versus a red carpet to be rolled out. To the extent those changes exist today, they have very little to do with legitimate business and a lot more to do with society, as generative AI's most dramatic efficiency improvement so far has been the creation of spam, slop, and disinformation. The world really is scrambling to adapt to massive adoption of the technology by bad actors, because their preferred workflows really are better with software that uses this technology. It's disgusting and gross, but it's not illogical, and it doesn't require think pieces on adoption.

But these use cases, in addition to being socially dubious, are also pretty niche in the grand scheme of things. For returns that justify the investments being made, it's going to take great, innovative software that turns whatever value exists in probability-based asset generation into something useful and accessible to people. Hilariously though, the one legitimate area this technology seems to be impacting is... creative software development! That's right — creating derivative, marginally customized versions of software that have existed forever is now incredibly cheap, and incredibly compelling to companies. So while what the industry desperately needs is a completely new set of original software ideas, that same industry is aggressively discouraging craft and originality in software. In short, I don't believe generative AI will really matter to the broader economy (outside of unsustainable data center expenditures) by remixing old ideas and conventions. It's just not that kind of innovation. We got away with — and I personally profited from — twenty years of building cloud-based versions of things that we knew people wanted and needed. And while it didn't work every time, there were tons and tons AND TONS of cases where that made sense, and simply bolting "internet" onto something useful made it better for a variety of reasons. That same approach is clearly being taken by today's AI founders (stick AI onto things), but the benefits of AI are way, way more nebulous, the downsides more obvious, and the costs higher than anything in the cloud era, and you're seeing that manifest in the "adoption problem" that simply isn't going away.

There's some amount of time you can just charge ahead and hope some version of Moore's Law becomes apparent and everything just becomes easier on its own. That certainly seems to be the plan, albeit one crafted and promoted by a bunch of executives my age and younger who have been drafting off of the actual Moore's Law their entire professional lives. I'm not sure they know what else to try, which is yet another reason why I think this is going to end very, very badly.

Football has always had problems, but from a fan experience perspective, it was basically the perfect setup for a long, long time. The sport simply owned Sunday afternoons, and in many ways, Monday night, not just because it was popular, but because it was so well engineered. No baseball/basketball/hockey-style fatigue or regular season grind, everything happening at once, everything important all the time. The league printed money, dominated TV and culture, and set whatever terms it wanted in everything it did.

But... it wasn't enough. And it never will be. Now, football is on too much. Thursday night games suck. There are random bad games in Europe at odd hours. The 16 game schedule is now 17 games, with a corresponding increase in injuries that make the results a little less about skill, and a little more about depth and attrition. Instead of just being "on", games are gated behind stupid services like Peacock, and Amazon Prime. Things are basically the same, just a little bit worse every year.

People can feel it. Football is still a dominant money machine, but almost no one is a fan of the direction the league is moving. And even that's not enough, because nothing is enough. Now the owners want 18 games, consequences be damned.

"I want to tell you guys that we're going to push like the dickens now to make international [games] more important with us," Kraft told the "Zolak & Bertrand" show. "Every team will go 18 [regular-season games] and two [preseason games] and eliminate one of the preseason games, and every team every year will play one game overseas."

I gotta tell you, I hate that everything is like this. We sometimes reprimand my intense, ambitious daughter for constantly pushing the envelope in an attempt to get the most out of things, or move them in the direction she wants. "Push, push, push", my wife will say, to remind her how exhausting it is to have even wonderful things stretched and exploited and distorted until they become frustrating facsimiles of themselves.

For our sake, we hope she reigns it in as she grows up, but if I'm being honest, I don't think it's a quality that will keep her from being successful. Maybe she'll own an NFL team.

I get why people are hesitant to abolish large parts of the government. I also get why, despite this, more and more people want to abolish the Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) agency.

While ICE's recent psychopathic-clown-show tactics have put it under a particularly bright spotlight, ultimately I think people want to "abolish" it for the same reasons some people wanted to "abolish" various local police organizations in 2020. At some point, it starts to feel like the safeguards on positions of state power are entirely voluntary, and that the people with that state-granted power are the ones who get to decide whether to obey them or not. Those aren't really safeguards! For all the talk of rounding up people who "broke the law", regular-ass Dads like me have been watching videos of morons in tactical gear blatantly violating a wide variety of rules, laws, and even Constitutional rights with absolutely no consequences whatsoever, let alone appropriate ones.

For instance, I'm sure I have seen over a hundred videos in the last six months of ICE and CBP employees doing something that made me think "that guy should go to prison for that", or maybe even "I think you're supposed to go to prison for that", and none of those guys are going to go to prison for those things, or even lose their jobs. Personally, I don't think it's weird for someone, at a certain point, to just say "the hell with all of this" and demand a fundamental rewrite of this part of the social contract.

Immunity as a Given

Many policy debates are essentially an exercise in trying to make people accept certain "givens". One given that's been pushed forever is the idea that law enforcement, for the most part, needs to be in charge of regulating itself. If someone from the government with a gun does something that looks or feels illegal, it should basically be up to a bunch of people who have the same job to decide whether there should be any repercussions, and usually the answer is "no".

Now, you can make an argument for this. You can say a world where law enforcement is held accountable by some other function, and not allowed to be given vast immunity to a host of otherwise criminal actions, would be a world where laws could not be enforced, and everything would go to shit. You can say that if police, or ICE agents, or whomever is zip-tying you today could not operate with absolute confidence that if they get scared, it's okay for them to shoot whatever they are scared of, that there would functionally be no policing at all. You can argue that! However, I do not find it especially compelling.

What I think is much, much more likely is that most people have done some math in their head that goes something like this. If a policy makes the police 5% more effective at protecting you from things you don't like, but 5000% more likely to hurt, rob, or kill innocent people while they do so, that seems like a bad trade. BUT, if you think the 5000% increase in abuse will happen exclusively to people who you are not concerned about, that trade seems fine. I mean, it shouldn't really seem fine, morally, but I would guess that it probably does, in fact, seem pretty fine to a lot of people. But this is just run of the mill "leopards eating faces" stuff. The point isn't "no real-world accountability breeds bad outcomes for state power", even though that's also true. The point is "if you've removed all real-world accountability you can't fix bad outcomes by adjusting the particulars of accountability".

In this case, that's the whole "do we fix ICE or get rid of it?" argument, which is a good argument to have. From my perspective, though, it's also not a very complicated one. ICE — and unfortunately, most 21st century law enforcement — have insisted on building policy around the idea that law enforcement cannot be held accountable the way regular people are, and in fact need to be fundamentally immune to almost all of the consequences a normal person would face for doing various violent or grossly illegal things to another normal person. That's non-negotiable, apparently. And now, with that principle in place, let's make some rules!

See why this is a waste of time? There are already lots of rules! They're simply being ignored because they can be ignored, and the only answer we can come up with are more rules that will also be ignored, because underneath it all too many of us still think law enforcement should get to decide if it did something bad or not.

In my heart of hearts, I think this is what animates people who want to abolish various law enforcement functions. I don't actually think — in most cases — it's some hippy-dippy belief that crime doesn't exist (although it really would help if the police solved more crimes) or that there is no need for law enforcement of any sort. Instead, it's a rejection of the idea that these organizations should exist as so many of them do — self-regulated, armed, well-funded, unionized, highly political groups that receive massive judicial and legislative deference in almost every scenario.

I think a world where turning off your legally-required body camera, for instance, and then arresting someone, was potentially a form of criminal negligence is absolutely unthinkable to a lot of people. But I think that position understates the seriousness of the task given to armed agents of the state. I didn't invent it, but I think the idea of "higher standards + real accountability + much higher salaries" isn't crazy even though it's not a panacea and the devil's in the details. Law enforcement is hard, but so is nuclear physics — and we don't let nuclear power plants self-regulate or operate with the knowledge that everyone working there will be immune from almost any criminal charge if they decide to kill a bunch of people.

And those are real cops! ICE makes the disconnect here even more obvious. What utility are we even getting out of these goons? I'm not going to stand around and listen to a theoretical argument about utility ICE might have if the people who work for it did their job in a completely different manner than the way — given carte blanche to do whatever they want and total deference from local authorities — they choose to actually do it. I'm going to take it as it is. They don't follow rules. They lie constantly. They willfully commit sociopathic violence with no consequences. Logically, how would you even fix that? Find some magic politician who will be our benevolent dictator and use his unaccountable army thoughtfully?

We had versions of that for a long time. No, not an actually benevolent ICE (imagine that, lol), but one that put at least some limits on itself because the idea of just telling the public, in every... single... interaction, to eat shit and die seemed... unseemly. But it was only a matter of time before thugs and goons would be drawn to the warm flame of unaccountable, masked violence and bullying, and now ICE simply is what it is — a relationship defined by its lack of boundaries, which means we can't fix it with boundaries. It just has to go, and then we try again with something completely different.