Farmers across southern England brought this year’s harvest in close to a month early. This years income is in. What none of them can tell you is what to put in the ground for next year, or what their income will be.

The almanac is probably still there somewhere, a reminder of different times. Sowing dates, varieties, the accumulated record of what does well in this soil in this county, recorded over generations. A valuable document, compiled for a climate that held still long enough to be described, but that climate has gone, and the almanac has not yet caught up.

And a different sort of climate arrived this month. On 16th July Hugging Face disclosed that it had detected and contained an intrusion by an autonomous agent system, and reported the incident to law enforcement. Five days later OpenAI said the agents were theirs: GPT‑5.6 Sol together with an unreleased model, run in an internal cyber evaluation with the usual guardrails switched off. These agents found their way out of the test environment through a flaw nobody knew about, worked across internal systems until they had internet access they were never meant to have, and reasoned that Hugging Face probably held the answers to the benchmark they were being marked against.

OpenAI called it “unprecedented”.

The security people did not. One veteran’s response was that one man’s “the model escaped the sandbox” is another man’s “you failed to build the sandbox correctly”. Another called it a containment failure with the safeties turned off, and a third pointed out that the sandbox had been given an unfiltered route to the internet, and that this was not a reasonable way to build one.

The disagreement sits entirely in the choice of word. “Unprecedented” is a weather word. It places the event beyond anyone’s responsibility, which is where an institution would rather have it. What happened was that somebody built a box, left a door in it, and turned off the alarms to see what the occupant would do.

We reach for weather metaphor when we would rather not say we built it.

Some of it is weather, of course, and the distinction matters. Water shows it. Hosepipe bans arrive with the human amplified drought and it feels like the same phenomenon. Ofwat’s figures for 2024‑25 put leakage at 2,869 million litres a day, about a fifth of everything put into the network, against an estimated 577 million litres a day that a nationwide ban would save. The industry’s answer is that leakage has fallen by 43 per cent since privatisation, which is true but does not alter the arithmetic of this summer, or the fact that water rationing in one of the world’s most temperate climates is not a weather problem at its core. It is an economic one. The drought is weather. The pipes are a series of decisions about what to maintain, taken over thirty years by people who prioritised dividends to shareholders over the security of their customers.

The farmer’s problem is harder than either, because sorting the weather from the decisions does not tell you what to sow. The question is not what the weather will do. It is the way we look after the ground. Artificial fertilisers carry a long term price for a short term gain. Who allowed money to leak to shareholders whilst the infrastructure they were responsible for wasted twenty percent of its product?

And now the AI technology seed merchants have arrived, full of confidence. Two to five times on general productivity. Five to ten in research, content and customer work. More in anything narrow enough to automate. The figures vary, but they are always multiples.

Weather does fractions. Noy and Zhang found around forty per cent off the time on writing tasks. Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, working with customer support agents, found roughly fourteen per cent overall and about a third for the least experienced. Dell’Acqua and colleagues at BCG found a quarter faster on work inside the range LLMs handle well, and nineteen points worse on work outside it. These are not neat multiples.

The study I find useful is METR’s. Sixteen experienced developers, 246 real tasks in areas they had worked in for five years, with each task randomly assigned to allow or disallow the tools. They forecast a twenty-four per cent speed-up. They were in fact nineteen per cent slower. Afterwards, having done the work and watched the clock, the developers estimated they had been twenty per cent faster.

Thirty-nine points between what they felt and reality. Easy when our eyes are on output, rather than outcome. Its seems long way detached from a farmers sense of their land. Sowing faster doesn’t make the crop grow faster.

The same is true for us. It is hard to measure our value when we are judged on output, not outcome. For anyone inside a large organisation, the largest single constraint on performance is who they report to. Ahead of the strategy and the state of the market, one person determines how much of you gets used, and that person’s appetite is shaped by the story they have to tell upwards.

Maybe we need to think like farmers. Knowledge, the seed we have been accustomed to selling is now a commodity. We can access and manipulate knowledge in moments, at negligible cost. Its where we plant it that matters, and how we look after the soil that are the relationships, our history with them, and how we nurture them. That is a fact about the soil we work, and the one most career planning addresses last.

The work that survives a change of climate is work somebody specifically wants from you, because of who you are as much as the skill you have. A thousand true fans was written by Kevin Kelly in 2008, arithmetic rather than evidence: a thousand people at a hundred a year comes to a hundred thousand. We’re all worth a hundred pounds a year to a thousand people, or more likely, a thousand a year to a hundred. The multiplication has never been the difficult part. The difficult part is accepting that we are, and that the people who want it can usually be named. You do not need many of them. A sole trader serves a handful of clients at a time; a freelancer perhaps fifteen; a small business fifty. These are not aspirational figures, they are routine. They are what the work looks like when things we no longer subject ourselves to being farmed for a regular monthly salary. We have always been enough, and AI tools can magnify that far more than a tired bureaucracy.

Planting a seed is a commitment made ahead of knowing what the weather will be. It always has been. The yield figures for AI do not exist yet; the multiples quoted are marketing and the percentages are careful studies designed to an end. For a farmer, seed goes in anyway, because a season not planted is a season lost. Our talents to be useful to enough people to make a living without being subjected to corporate arbitrage is no different.

The question of what we do has more to do with ground than with seed. We cannot change the seed we are, only the environment we plant it in.

When it comes to you and AI, this great piece by is food for thought:

KK

Latent Space as a New Medium

Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code? My answer is the latent spaces within AIs themselves will become a new medium for creativity. I will first explain what I mean by latent space, and then at the…

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15 days ago · 283 likes · 41 comments · Kevin Kelly

I wrote last week about the debt we carry when we develop a story in anticipation of a world that turns out not to be there as we arrive.

It is a moment we share with the lamplighter, looking at the electric lights. Or with the inventors themselves. Edison published ten uses for the phonograph in the “North American Review* in 1878. Dictation came first, music fourth, and he resisted the entertainment market for years. Bell marketed the telephone for business and emergencies and actively discouraged social calls. It was rural subscribers, women in particular, who made it an instrument of sociability. By the mid-1920s the industry surrendered and began marketing what its users had already decided.

In the early days of a new general-purpose technology, the people who invent it believe they hold the whip hand. With the telephone there was panic about who might speak to whom, fear of contagion spreading down the wire, and an unsettling of the boundary between household and public.

Adoption, meanwhile, follows the money, not the logic. Electricity came to streets and trams first, then factories, then homes, and to farms last of all; individuals met it as spectacle decades before they met it as utility. Print took two generations to find its native forms, and printers stayed solvent on the indulgences, calendars and jobbing work of a disappearing world while the printed book was still discovering its shape. Those in power see the new thing as an extension of what they already do, and as hubristic entitlement, They carry their own particular form of story debt.

Fairy stories show us the way. In any story about three wishes, it is the third wish that has to undo the first two. The first two are made in confusion, wishes for what might be, regardless of where we are. The third leans into uncertainty, and a degree of clarity about what to do with what we have been offered.

In simpler times we were encouraged to keep a version of our business plan we could deliver in an elevator in thirty seconds. Something that said we know exactly what we are doing and why you need it. As we get to grips with our latest general-purpose technology, those elevator statements belong with the first two wishes. What people want from us now, in the third, is evidence that we are not confused. They do not mind us being uncertain, because uncertainty is clarity and a place to start. Confusion is something else altogether. Confusion is a disorder of orientation; no frame, and nothing counts as an answer. Uncertainty is a frame that knows its own limits. The uncertain can name an experiment. The confused can only name their discomfort.

During the week this gave me a small moment of clarity. The elevator pitch, and the business plan behind it, worked as stories of certainty. With a technology this powerful and moving this quickly, any such story is the worst sort of fairy tale; a first wish, made in the vocabulary of a world that is full of uncertainty.

Once upon a time, being inside the walls offered us security. Increasingly, what it offers is certainty on somebody else’s terms.

We have made our early wishes with this technology.

It will soon be time to be clear about our third.

Muriel Rukeyser thought that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms. I suspect the same is true of our economies, as we have moved from economies of tangible goods and services made and sold, to stories: promises of what they will become, rather than what they are today. In a world predicated on perpetual more, the story of enough is a commodity.

Somewhere along this journey, we have adopted the same principles; that our value is in what we might enable and become in the future, rather than who we are today. We value the promise of tomorrow over the reality of today, and the idea of life on Mars over the reality of life today. Elon Musk’s notional wealth would buy two thousand hospitals at five hundred million each; enough good done now to make tomorrow on a distant planet look like the poorer bargain.

And that values drift seeps into every aspect of our work lives. Resumes have become stories about our ability to create stories that we have got others to buy, more than our ability to be useful to them in ways that matter beyond the margins we create for distant shareholders.

There is a particular tiredness that comes from defending a version of yourself we have privately stopped believing in. We hear it in the way someone recites their title a beat too quickly, protects a network they no longer respect, or keeps a qualification burnished long after the work it once certified has become obsolescent. Nothing is being lied about, exactly; we simply owe more to the story of who we say we are than the story is currently worth, and the interest payments we owe on the mortgage we have taken out on the story of who we are grow larger by the day.

Software people have a phrase for the first half of this. When they take a shortcut to ship something on time, they call the consequence technical debt: the code works, but every later change now costs a little more, and that extra cost is the interest on the corner they cut. It is a phrase that makes an invisible thing legible. The debt can be carried while we have momentum and the means to pay it down; the trouble begins when the debt remains as momentum slows and starts, unnoticed, to take control.

We carry the same kind of debt on ourselves, and it behaves like a mortgage. A mortgage makes a valuable servant. It is how many of us come to live anywhere at all. We borrow against a future based on a set of assumptions of progress so that we can occupy a house we could not otherwise afford, now.

A story about ourselves works the same way. We claim the identity before we have quite earned it, the new title, the place in a group that confers it, and then spend years either growing into it, or finding, gradually (and often, then suddenly), that we will not.

In the early days, almost every payment is interest. The story we have sold demands that we grow into it, on its terms. When things are going well, little of that effort touches the underlying question of whether the thing is yet true. If our story and reality start to align, we build equity, and the story becomes ours to keep.

The difficulty arises when we cannot keep up the payments. Sometimes the ground moves; the profession or trade we trained for thins out, the certificate hanging in the hall gradually becomes a part of history, the story becomes worth less than what we still owe on it, and we find ourselves refinancing.

We move from one job in a slowly failing sector to another in another company that is looking to us for its salvation, and we increase our story mortgage to do it. It used to be we could carry on like this for most of a career, and if all else failed, retire early. I think this is much of what it costs to stay inside the walls of an institution, or a profession, where we have a settled identity, comfortable in proportion to how much of ourselves we have mortgaged in order to belong to them. So we go on defending them for the same reason we keep paying a mortgage we can no longer justify: not because we cannot recognise what is happening, but because the collateral is our story, and we cannot find another buyer.

What happens, though, when we are inside the walls, paying our story mortgage, and find barbarians at the gate?

The barbarians at the gate used to be people with spreadsheets. They came for the asset that was the company we were inside. What they wanted from us was more of the same work we were already doing, harder and for less, so that the debt they had loaded onto the place could be paid down through us. It was extraction, brutal, but it left the story of us intact, if now discounted. Those of us who worked through the closing years of the last century will recognise, and feel, this scenario. They needed the person at the post. Whatever story we had mortgaged to occupy that post, they wanted us to go on servicing it, because our story was one of the cash flows they had bought.

The barbarian at the gate now is a different creature, and it wants something else. It has not come to work us harder. It has come to establish, item by item, which parts of us are now necessary. It is very good at many aspects of the story we sold: the performance measures, the productivity improvements and the other data we promoted in order to belong.

Process, Lean, Agile, Six Sigma; the method turned into procedure, the judgment written down so another could follow it, and the piece of paper that certified we had done this before. These were the very things we mortgaged our story against, and they can do it without us. It does not besiege our position; it dissolves the part of the position that could be written down. And it does this from inside the walls, because the institution itself let it in, to service its own overborrowed story for one or two more years.

And so we arrive somewhere the asset-strippers never took us. They left us our story and took the company; this one takes our story and leaves us standing there holding only whatever the story was wrapped around.

We might ask, why me? I suspect the answer is in the nature of the walls themselves. Most of our large organisations are vehicles built to enable scale, and carry the DNA of scientific management in their structure. The office was born the day we agreed to write the work down. Scientific management took the judgment out of the hand and put it in the file; a file needs a clerk, a clerk needs a procedure, and the procedure needs a tier of people to run it. The corporation is the residue of a single decision to make tacit work legible.

Inside the walls, a person who has mastered words and rules exerts a power out of all proportion to what he could do at the work itself, and the walls exist precisely to grant that leverage. They are made of what can be measured, and reward whoever makes themselves most legible to them.

Until they no longer do. LLMs are native to the file in a way no clerk ever was; all they have to do is internalise the data.

But what, I am wondering, about the new stories? LLMs will parse and rearrange and reinvent all of our existing stories to infinity. In doing so, they will give us valuable perspectives on what we already know. They will extend the franchise of what organisations already know. There is value in that, but it has a shelf life.

New stories need new thinking. LLMs can help us here. They have far greater working memories than we do. They can take what we know, rearrange it, and give it back to us, so that we can interrogate it in ways we could not before. But I am not sure that LLMs will step over the threshold. I suspect they will be happiest inside the walls.

Outside the walls asks for a different set of skills altogether. And that is the question we are left with: what those skills are, and where a person goes to learn them, once the our file has been handed to the better clerk.

So much is shifting at once that I find it hard to know where to stand, let alone where to start. Gaps everywhere.

John Muir saw the difficulty more than a century ago, walking the Sierra:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, he wrote, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Pull on one thread and the whole fabric moves.

So the task becomes simpler and more uncomfortable at the same time: pick a gap.

Any one will do. Find one that holds your attention, and from there work your way toward the one that matters now.

I have never found much to hold me in the gaps we make for ourselves. The gap in a market, in a strategy, or in the politics of the week; these are shallow things, drawn in data and coloured by opinion, and they close about as quickly as they open.

Nature keeps deeper examples, so I have gone back to a metaphor I have used previously, the gap that opens in a forest canopy when an old tree fails and falls, and to the under-storey beneath it, that patient tangle of established but under-resourced growth waiting on the forest floor.

When a canopy tree comes down, the fastest gaps to close are not filled by anything new. Most small openings shut again within a season or two, closed from the side as the neighbouring trees extend their crowns into the light; nothing is replaced, and the incumbents simply grow larger. Only when a gap is too wide for the surrounding crowns to reach across does the question of what rises from below arise at all. The first quality that governs how a gap closes, then, is simply its size; and the first thing the forest tells us is that the scale of a failure decides who occupies the space. A modest firm goes down and its rivals absorb the space sideways before anything emergent gets near it. It takes a collapse large enough to open vertical room, room the incumbents cannot lean into, before the understorey gets its chance.

And when it does, what happens next is set less by what arrives after the gap opens than by what was already standing in the shade before it did. Foresters have a name for it: “advance regeneration”. Shade-tolerant saplings established years earlier, holding at knee or waist height, a stem and a root system already in place with almost nothing above ground to show for the patience. When the canopy breaks they are released; that word belongs to the foresters, but it feels right to me for where we find ourselves,

They climb fast because they are not starting; they are resuming.

A gap with a deep bank of that suppressed growth beneath it closes quickly. A gap with no such bank, one that must wait for a seed to blow in, settle on bare ground and begin from nothing, closes slowly, uncertainly, unpredictably, and often to a thinner and more restless set of occupants.

This is the lesson I most want to carry across: uncertainty does not create the thing that fills the gap. It releases what is already there in us.

There is another lesson underneath that one. What gets released is not always what we would have chosen. An opening can go to bramble as readily as to oak, and the bramble does not merely arrive; it holds. Whoever covers the ground first can keep it covered, shading out the slower, taller thing that would, given time, have made the better wood. Ecologists who study this call it inhibition. The fastest coloniser of a gap is rarely the one that would crown it in fifty years, and it can stop that crown ever forming. Speed into the opening is one thing. Fitness to hold it for a lifetime is quite another; and so what thrives in the wreck of an old order is often no heir to it at all. It is something that could only ever have grown in the wreckage: a form suited to disturbance, to bare ground and open sun, to the short window before the canopy closes over again.

At this point the metaphor has done its work for me; I will not push it further because I know people who have forgotten more about forests than I will ever have time to learn, and I would rather stop at the edge of what I am beginning to understand than infer a competence I lack.

And so to the gaps of our own moment, the ones opening now in the made world of markets and firms and work as a new technology moves through them. It is opening gaps quickly, many of them wide; in tasks, professions and trades, and in whole categories of employment.

The forest gives us better questions to ask of them than the ones usually on offer.

The usual question is who will build the next thing, and what must we learn as though the gap will be filled by whatever proves cleverest at starting from nothing once the light arrives. The forest suggests otherwise. It says look to what is already standing in the shade. The order that follows a large failure is rarely invented in the opening; it is drawn up into it, released from whatever was established, suppressed and waiting while the canopy still held. So the question is not what we will build after the gaps appear. It is what we are quietly building now, in the shade, while the old canopy still stands and still pays.

What have we let root, almost unnoticed, with little above ground to show for it, that could be released when the light comes?

There is more to a falling tree than the light it lets in. When a tree dies it stops drawing on the soil, and for a while the ground beneath it is unclaimed; water, nutrients, and the space where roots can run. That below-ground opening is invisible from above, and it closes faster than the hole in the canopy, because the surrounding trees push their roots into the freed soil long before anything moves toward the canopy. A seedling can stand in full light and still starve. In the world of firms the light is the visible part, the released demand, and the customers suddenly looking for somewhere to go. The soil is everything underneath: the capital, distribution, specialised people, data and the trusting relationships a new venture actually needs. The survivors reach those first. Whilst a logical, carefully argued proposition can look appealing, it can lack the root structure it needs.

Set beside all this, some of the confident forecasts look questionable. We are told to expect the single-person company grown to enormous value, the one-person unicorn; a great crown thrown up fast on the strength of the technology. Perhaps. But a crown is not a root system, and the forest is unsentimental about the difference. Height gained quickly, without the slow underground architecture that anchors a tree and feeds it through drought, is height held only until the first real storm. The question I would put to any such venture is not how high it has grown but what holds it down: what relationships, what tacit knowledge, what feel for the subject, what reason to endure past the season it happened to be fashionable.

A firm can be all canopy. It does not usually stay standing.

And I also have to rethink my earlier argument, because I described the bramble up as the thing that smothers, but the forest will not let me leave it there. I had the bramble as the coloniser that takes the open ground and holds it, shading out the slower tree that would have made the better wood.

It can be that. But in grazed country it is as often the reverse. The oak does not establish in the open, where the deer and the rabbit find it; it establishes down inside the thorns, hidden and defended, and grows up through the bramble that sheltered it until it overtops and shades out the very cover that saved it. The country legend for this is older than the science that confirms it:

“The thorn is the mother of the oak”

Which turns the question round. Perhaps the fast, thorny technology moving into the gaps is not the thing that smothers the slow-rooted work but the thing that shelters it through the years it could not survive in the open, and is outgrown, in the end, by what it nurtures.

AI can support relationships, but is unlikely to last without them.

The same thorn shelters one seedling and smothers another, and the difference lies in how the two grow together. Kasparov, having lost to the machine, drew the lesson the rest of us are still catching up with: a modest player working well with a computer will beat both the grandmaster alone and the computer alone. He called the good version the centaur, human and engine grown into one animal with the human still holding the reins. There is a poor version too, the reverse-centaur, where the person is yoked to the machine and set to keep its pace and carry out its judgement. The technology makes one or the other of us according to how the work is arranged, which is to say the arrangement is now both craft, and personal discipline.

A real one, a new one, and there is no manual for it. There was no handbook for living with steam, and none for electricity; the mills and the households worked it out as they went, badly at first, over a generation or more.

We are early in the same kind of working-out, and the surest way to end up yoked to the thing is to pretend otherwise, that it is simple, or that the working-out is already behind us, and that there are experts who know.

This is close to what I find myself saying to the artisans I work with: that learning to work well with these tools is itself a piece of craft, to be served the way any craft is served, by doing it, getting it wrong, and doing it again. And that in the end each of us is understorey.

Despite its hubris, the current business canopy is fragile, desperate for nourishment without any certainty as to the fruit that nutrition will give rise to.

We are the growth on the floor, established but under-resourced, and the light we depend on is one we can neither govern nor predict. So the question I am left holding is not how to win the gap when it opens. It is gentler than that.

What is the quality of the connections I am putting down now, in the shade, while there is nothing above ground to show for them? Whose thorns am I sheltering inside, ready for the day the canopy breaks and the light comes down?

Because it will.

A resume is not a reputation.

Last week I wrote about the apparatus large organisations build to manage the gap between what they are and what they want to be seen as being. The individual looking for work now faces a smaller version of the same temptation, and now has a technology that will act on it in seconds.

Resumes are now largely functionally useless. They can be created, copied, counterfeited, and manipulated to the point at which they contain little of value, and are about as much help in determining the qualities of who they describe as a PR department is for understanding the organisation that employs them.

Most are now read first by software that scores them for keywords, which means the document is increasingly written by one machine to satisfy another, while the person who is supposedly its subject becomes an uninvolved observer.

Michael Spence showed, in 1973, that a credential conveys information only when it is differentially costly to fake; costly for the weak candidat…

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Last week I wrote about agency:

“the capacity to act on the world such that the world registers the act, and the feedback comes back to you.”

The action begins with you, and the difference it makes can be traced to you. I want to hold that theme for this post, because an email arrived on Monday that put flesh on the argument in a way I had not quite anticipated.

Parliament is to debate its support for the ceramics industry on 6 July.

It will probably be a short debate.

✦

Since the pandemic, the doors have closed at Wade Ceramics, Johnsons Tiles, Royal Stafford, Heraldic Pottery, and most recently Denby Pottery. Moorcroft was bought by the founder’s grandson; the gesture matters, but the general direction of travel does not change. Wedgwood and Portmeirion are teetering. The skills of those who made the goods, and the ethics of the founders who created them, are not available for recycling. Parliament will express regret, then it will probably move on to something more politically exciting.

…

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Last week I wrote that we are all beginners now. The thought has stayed with me, and changed shape.

The relationship we have with our work is starting to feel like the relationship horses had with the plough when the tractor arrived. We are putting AI at the centre of the argument about work, much as people put the tractor at the centre of theirs a hundred years ago. I think it is the same mistake. A century ago the thing at the centre was the farm. The thing at the centre now is the way we make and create what we need. What did not change then, and I doubt will change now, is that human life still has to be fed, and housed, and somehow held together. What changed was how we organise to do it.

I have begun to wonder whether our attention is in the wrong place. We watch individuals, when we might do better to watch organisations, because if the analogy holds, organisations are the horses. They are what the new machine acts upon most powerfully.

And as organisations change, we will have l…

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There is a historical rhyme to this. When electric motors first reached factories, owners pulled out the steam engine, set a dynamo in its place, and changed nothing else: the central shaft, the drive belts, and the building linked to one source of power. For about thirty years the productivity gains barely showed. They arrived only when someone stopped treating the motor as a better engine and saw it as a different principle, a motor on eac…

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Five miles east of me, eight metres below the surface of a Derby street, runs a brick-arched Victorian sewer that has been carrying the contents of those houses since the 1860s. A small number of engineers can tell you, with reasonable accuracy, what condition it is in. None of them sits in the rooms where decisions are taken about how much money it might receive over the next thirty years.

Those rooms are in Toronto, Sydney, Riyadh, and the City of London. The people in them have never seen the sewer, and will never see it because the sewer exists for them as a row of figures on the regulated asset base of a privatised utility. Between the engineer who knows the pipe and the analyst who allocates the money, the formal apparatus of British water provision runs sixteen separate companies, a sequence of regulators that is shortly to be merged into one, an investment cycle that turns on five-year price reviews, and a debt structure that the National Audit Office has not yet finished mapp…

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In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has one of his characters asked how he went bankrupt. His answer?: Gradually, then suddenly.

The line has been repeated often enough to have worn a little smooth, and become so familiar it is easy to dismiss, but the structure that underlies it remains fresh, because change does not pause. It is how most large changes arrive: an accumulation of small shifts that go uncounted because each one is small, followed by a moment in which the cumulative weight becomes undeniable.

By the time the suddenly arrives, it’s normally a done deal; we have to accept it and move on rather than fight it. Like grief, it’s a hard road to travel.

We are surrounded at the moment by suddenlies of different sizes and at different scales. Some are personal. We get older knowing perfectly well what is coming, and we still find ourselves avoiding the discussions that would help those affected, as well as us.

People in mid-career are discovering that careers, as their parents understo…

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A recent piece in The Economist (17th May 2026) reports that China is sliding into a third internet era, in which AI “super-apps” no longer merely recommend but choose, purchase and arrange delivery on the user’s behalf. More than 600 million Chinese are thought to have used some form of agentic app already. Alibaba has now fully integrated its Qwen chatbot with Taobao, ByteDance is binding Doubao to Douyin, and Tencent is weaving its new hy3 model into WeChat and the millions of mini-programs that live inside it. The piece notes, almost in passing, that the correspondent asked one such app for a “special coffee” and was duly sent a rose-petal-vinegar concoction — a comic illustration of how readily the act of choosing can now bypass us.

The striking thing is not the technology but the quiet transfer it depends on: each delegated decision is a small piece of agency stepping outside the person and taking up residence in the system.

I’ve been working with AI for about 18 months, not to un…

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There’s a crack in everything. It’s where the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Where the Puck Are We Going?

Wayne Gretzky’s father, Walter, coached him to move to where the puck was going to be, not where it had been. It was a line famously used by Steve Jobs when he talked about the iPhone.

In the frenzy to capitalise on a technology we do not yet really understand completely, I think we may have forgotten this lesson.

When I look around the business press, social media, and increasingly, unfortunately, here on Substack, people are obsessed with where the puck has been. I think they’re missing the point.

The critical factor in any organisation, particularly in volatile and emerging sectors, is not the tools or the technology. It’s the social friction between people. AI can speed up tasks, coordinate, and reduce infrastructure and overhead, but it cannot build trust or relationships or the deep knowledge of who does what and why.

AI does not change the nature of small groups. It changes the re…

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It’s difficult to read the label on a container from inside it. Sometimes, we need to find a way to step outside it, and find the freedom to play by different rules. Having just spent a week on the island of Malta, without my tech, it reminded me that holidays can act as catalysts to playing with disobedient thoughts. Nicholas Monserrat’s “The Kappilan of Malta” provided not just a wonderful description of the Island and its history, but a provocation, and as we enter peak holiday season, I find myself wondering what it takes to turn disobedient daydreams to rebellious action.

Given the multiple threads of uncertainty we face, not much, I suspect.

A quick gallop around some research on insurgency throws up some interesting ideas to play with. Ted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel (1970) held that political violence is driven by relative deprivation: the gap between what people expect and what they receive. The argument is that political upheaval is the result of collective discontent caused by a sen…

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I have been thinking about the news that GitHub Copilot is moving to token-based billing. It is a small story, on the face of it. A subscription becomes a meter rather than a licence, and the price of using AI, which has been hidden inside a monthly fee subsidised by enormous quantities of venture capital, is becoming visible.

Where GitHub leads, other vendors will follow; the move is structural rather than transitional, as Ed Zitron has been at pains to point out in this excellent article. The economics have never been in doubt; the marketing effort is evolving as business need turns to addiction; and the bill is now arriving.

What has been turning over in my head is not the price story itself; it is what lies beneath it. For three years we have been told, in roughly equal measure, that AI is a transformative resource and that it is essentially free at point of use. And we have chosen to believe it. We have been encouraged to use it for ever…

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I hope you’re enjoying this late spring early summer sunshine. I’m travelling for a couple of weeks, largely sans signal :-), but will be back in a fortnight. Until then, go well.

A Thought

R

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Growth is a ravenous beast; all the more so when the growth is demanded by those who don’t have skin in the game. Then it is all about appearances; a convincing story to tell, knowing people won’t check the substance.

It is the mentality and culture of Potemkin villages, something rapidly put together and just convincing enough to fool somebody passing by without stopping to look carefully. People have built entire careers creating corporations that are Potemkin villages, where instead of paint, it is a series of acquisitions and ambitious, if flawed, strategies that beguile the unwary. Caveat emptor: networks of privilege, easy debt, and golden parachutes.

There is something particular about debt incurred without the intention of repaying it. It is not recklessness or malign intent. It is calculation: that the bill will fall due after you have left the building, taken the bonus, and moved on. The debt becomes someone else’s problem. It is the sort of debt that administers the coup de …

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There is something deeply unsettling about discovering that the walls we trusted were never quite solid. Those around us believe in them, so we believe in them too. That particular conspiracy holds together perfectly well until the walls are tested, and they are now being tested to destruction.

What we might be facing is less rearrangement, more revolution.

Last week, I wondered about what we might do as the walls were being rearranged. This week I find myself wondering whether they will not so much be rearranged as disappear entirely and new ones replace them. We have become so preoccupied with artificial intelligence that human intelligence is not getting much of a look-in, and I think we need to change that.

“If we were going to define a revolution? - It’s the replacement of elites.”

Jimmy Carr on the TRIGGERnometry podcast. (recommended watch)

Ideas have their own elites, and create their own self-serving dogma. Elites won’t disappear, but they will change as the old order can no l…

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“Walls look like order; but more often than not, a wall stands at the precise fulcrum of an imbalance in society. Most walls are only necessary as a means of defending the resources of those who have them from those who lack them. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.”

Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Walls, like borders, are only stories.

There is nothing to stop us from crossing a line or climbing a wall other than the story we tell ourselves about it. The system that says what’s behind the wall is mine, whilst I remain perfectly free to access what is on your side, has been given a veneer of respectability by the idea of a rules-based order, even though access to that order has always been a matter of privilege.

And then, around every ten generations or so, somebody comes along and rearranges the walls. Energetic beginnings harden into complex, affluent systems. Elites consolidat…

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Crawford is right, and not just about the lines drawn between nations. The maps we make of our economies, our organisations, and our technologies are stories we have chosen to tell, presented as though they were simply descriptions of what is.

I have been spending time lately with James Cheshire’s wonderful “The Library of Lost Maps”. It is one of those books you keep nearby, not to read straight through but to open when you need to think. It is full of wonderful passages, including this one from Beryl Markham, writing in 1942:

“Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away if you will. It is only paper, it is only paper and ink but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with h…

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I think the real genius of children’s authors is their ability to take the complex and reduce it to its essence, not because children need simplicity - they can work it out for themselves - but because we do.

And given where we find ourselves this morning, anybody who can provide clarity is worth their weight in gold, and it took me to Maurice Sendak and his famous “Where the Wild Things Are”.

If you have children or grandchildren, or even if you were once a child yourself, you will probably be familiar with it:

The night Max wore his wolf suit, he made mischief of one kind and another and was sent to bed without his supper. Lying in the dark, his room began to change. A forest grew. A boat appeared, and he sailed away, in and out of weeks and almost over a year, to the place where the Wild Things are. They roared and gnashed and rolled their terrible eyes. Max stared them down without blinking, and they made him their king. He led the wild rumpus: howling, dancing, a moonlit riot that…

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