My job: Finding the best articles and amplifying them out. [Image via Gemini]

With Webnerd.ai bringing fast paced consumption and sharing back to my daily routine, the muscle of scanning, filtering and amplifying is back. This week is no different.

After a decade's effort in building out siloed social networks that aim to keep their content boxed in, independent blogging has endured and continues to push back. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out Paul Ford's post, The Web Is More Than Enough, where he showcased launching an entire browser-based office suite where all activity lives right in the URL, reminding us that the open web remains the most durable application platform on earth. Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick called out Reddit bricking up login walls, saying its defensive posture runs against Aaron Swartz's open access roots.

What we all saw this week with the US midterm elections is that closed networks force closed thinking. Republicans learned that X is the echo chamber. It was an inevitable result after Elon's acquisition and government meddling chased away all the left-leaning free thinkers to new places.  As Andy Baio called out, we know closed social feeds confuse algorithmic echo chambers with real-world consensus.

(I told you already that X was toxic, but maybe the right wing has figured this out now too?)

We are all continuing to learn where AI fits in our workflow and how much we invest in it. This is true at the corporate level as well. Tomasz Tunguz ran the math on an 80-gigawatt AI ceiling for 2027, showing how doubling GPU rental rates are pushing inference bills to new heights, while cheap AI intrusion tools are straining security teams at unprecedented levels.

AI is doing incredible things in terms of resetting expectations for employees at all levels. It's reset expectations for middle managers and reset expectations for new hires. At Anthropic, Felix Rieseberg said he has retired traditional coding interviews because hunger beats whiteboard tenure in an agentic world. And John Battelle captured the emotional knot of modern tech workers in Baring It All To Claude, which can mean trusting a model with your life's work, and hoping for the best.

When platforms wall themselves off and algorithms chase outrage, sitting down with an RSS reader and sharing good writing by hand isn't nostalgia. It's how we keep the web human. I'll be doing my part over at Webnerd.ai, and sharing out to RSS or Bluesky or wherever you like. That's what standards are for.

Webnerd.ai Share & Subscribe -- live now in the Chrome Web Store.

The Web content model consists of three major parts: creation, discovery and distribution. The last decade-plus has seen tremendous turbulence as one-time hubs came and went, and content creators lost a grip on how their content could be consumed and shared easily from both dedicated fans and casual visitors. Couple that with shorter attention spans and all matter of marketing hacks that have distracted core audiences, and it's a tough slog out there for journalists and bloggers.

One of the motions I've missed in our consumption and flow has been the fast option to share and subscribe as I encounter the best content on the web. So I've built a Chrome extension for Webnerd.ai that has three major functions:

1. Subscribe to new sources and add them to your folders as you browse.
2. Add individual items to your shares in Webnerd.ai, even without subscribing.
3. Share directly to Bluesky, with optional caption.

Starting today, Webnerd.ai Share & Subscribe is officially public on the Chrome Web Store, working across Chrome and other modern browsers, such as Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, and Edge.

Back in our Web 2.0 peak, I had bookmarklets for Google Reader and FriendFeed as mainstays in my browser and I could see top stories spread from person to person. The act of sharing content helps expose great new sources to my network, and in turn, I learn from them.

Here are some benefits of the Webnerd.ai extension:

One click publishes the story directly to your Webnerd.ai Shared Items, your personal curated stream (like mine at @louis-gray), and its accompanying RSS feed.

The extension is tuned for fast link-blogging while you read, including:

• Auto-Saved Quotes & Notes: Highlight any passage on the page before opening the extension and it drops right in as a clean blockquote.
• Automatic Tracker Stripping: Marketing parameters like utm_*, fbclid, gclid, and newsletter tracking tokens get scrubbed automatically before you share.
• Simultaneous Bluesky Cards & Standard.site Endorsements: Keep the Bluesky box checked to cross-post straight to your feed (such as my LG Stream) with rich OpenGraph link cards, compressed thumbnails, clickable hashtag facets, and cryptographic site.standard.graph.recommend endorsements via AT Protocol OAuth 2.1.

Live Feed Radar, Cadence Previews, and One-Click Folders

Spot hidden feeds with an optional glow, check the posting cadence, and add as you go.

Modern browsers stripped the orange RSS icon out of the address bar years ago, indicating millions of readers that feeds died when they were actually hiding in plain sight. Turn on the extension's opt-in Toolbar Glow  and the toolbar icon gently illuminates whenever a page publishes RSS, Atom, JSONFeed, or AT Protocol Standard.site publications -- including subscribable channels and profiles across Substack, Medium, YouTube, GitHub, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Reddit.

And if you are worried you're going to subscribe to a site that posts way too often, you can previews a feed's latest three headlines alongside an instant cadence check, so you know right away if a blog is active. From there, file the writer directly into any of your existing Webnerd.ai folders or spin up a new folder inline.

Right-Click Quick Share and Privacy-First Permissions

Right-click any page, quote, or link to Quick Share in the background with zero browsing tracking.

When you're moving fast, right-click any page, highlighted quote, or outbound link and hit Quick Share to Webnerd.ai. It publishes in the background and pops a clean confirmation toast in the corner of the page with direct links to view your post on Bluesky or in Shared Items.

Just as important is what the extension refuses to do. Too many browser add-ons demand blanket access to read every page you visit around the clock. I couldn't care less about your browsing history. Out of the box, Webnerd.ai runs on minimal activeTab permissions -- zero background tracking of your browsing activity -- only inspecting the current tab when you click the icon, tap the hotkey, or trigger the context menu (unless you explicitly opt into the ambient Feed Radar glow).

install Webnerd.ai Share & Subscribe from the Chrome Web Store, pin the pulse icon to your toolbar, and tap 1-Click Pair over at webnerd.ai/extension to connect your existing Webnerd.ai session. Give it a spin on your open tabs today and ping me on Bluesky with what you want to see next -- the native Android app is up next.

Staring into Silicon Valley's soft-focus mirror [Image via Gemini]

Every few years, Silicon Valley decides traditional reporters just don't get it and builds a friendlier stage of its own. The latest flashpoint is Andrew Fedorov's look in The San Francisco Standard at Colossus, the latest venture-backed pub featuring adoring profiles of Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders. Kara Swisher compared the magazine to "Vaseline mirrors" for fragile executives, while Nilay Patel of The Verge quipped that the tech bubble is welcome to its own "in-flight magazine." First of all, I've never heard of it. Sometimes it's good to be in my focused bubble. But it's all going to be okay.

Back in 2009, I wrote that bloggers and PR aren't automatic enemies when everyone understands the transaction, and during the 2011 spat around over investor-backed tech blogs, I said being genuine is the best disclosure of them all. Insiders who fund companies will typically understand how those businesses operate better than outsiders do, and content marketing can be valuable if it gets a story that couldn't have gotten out otherwise, so long as it owns its perspective. It's the final stage of access journalism, for better or worse.

Readers aren't fooled by what they see. Just like our debates around AI-generated content or if ads have value, they know what promotional content smells like. Where this fluffery actually causes damage is inside the corner office itself - reinforcing these execs' hot takes that they lack any issues. Last month, I wrote about how filtertainment eviscerated our informed monoculture, letting every slice of society retreat into comfortable spaces populated entirely by people who agree with them. Founders and billionaires are just as vulnerable to that comfort loop as anyone scrolling apps on their couch.

The best Silicon Valley products get better because they survive contact with skeptics and users. Tough questions from beat reporters, teardowns on independent blogs, and grumpy user threads expose blind spots that boardroom peers don't dare to say - lose the fast track to shares or other privileges. When leaders trade that messy friction for curated profiles that treat every strategic pivot like destiny, they quietly dull their own product instincts. Even my own new Webnerd.ai app has already benefitted from user feedback or bugs that got through my queue.

Print a shiny mag if you want to leave it on the coffee table in the lobby or frame it on your wall. Enjoy the friendly banter that comes from knowing no gotcha questions are coming your way. But don't forget the purpose of an in-flight magazine: keep the passengers relaxed at thirty thousand feet while somebody else checks the instruments. The trouble starts the moment the pilot starts using it as a navigation chart.

Disclosures per always: I have always appreciated Kara. What. You wanted more disclosures?

Even in an AI world, the human filter provides value. [Image via Gemini]

The web has always been about discovery and sharing. Whether it was from blogrolls or a bullet list item of links on our blogs, we have acted as curators, showing our audiences what we found valuable, and inherently filtering out the noise. In the peak of Web 2.0 experimentation with classic RSS, I could add an item to Delicious and it would flow through Friendfeed to Twitter, or I could share an item I found in Google Reader and have it show up downstream in Buzz. What a time.

Building one-click sharing directly into Webnerd.ai brought that muscle memory back. Every story I flag lands on my public shared page, syndicates to LG Stream on Bluesky, and publishes its own dedicated RSS feed anyone can subscribe to in their reader of choice. In the meantime, old school bloggers like Dave Winer have continuously posted links to share the best of the web on their domain. I respect it. I used to do a better job of highlighting individual blogs, so let's bring that muscle memory back too.

It seems wacky to think Anthropic's IPO filing was just this week. CNBC (via Techmeme) highlighted the company's more than $131 billion in cash and short-term investments, while Timothy B. Lee said its business was surprisingly strong. Latent Space highlighted how Anthropic uses Claude itself, and The Verge focused on how Anthropic can keep Wall Street pressure at bay.

But the week wasn't by any means totally bullish. Like many other companies, Microsoft is continuing to optimize spending by reducing headcount, offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees. Tom Warren and Azeem Azhar at Exponential View connected the dots plainly: when capital spending continues to accelerate, payroll cuts make room for machines. Meanwhile, long time Google watcher John Battelle put a rattled Friday market selloff in long-term Silicon Valley perspective.

Beyond the money line, Sean Goedecke published a pair of excellent posts, arguing that getting good at AI takes deliberate practice, and reminding developers that you can just ask AI to do things when agency becomes your bottleneck. Go subscribe to Sean right now.

That builder energy showed up across the product beat too, from Simon Willison testing webframe as a headless browser sandbox, to Google shipping Gemini 4 Carbon and Genie 4, pricing the Google Xreal Aura glasses at $1,099, and Waymo tapping Toyota's bZ4X for Tokyo robotaxis. Yes, I work at Google, but we're a big enough company that sometimes seeing this news is like being happy for your cousins. Go team and such.

Like I said last night, AI is impacting just about everything, and humans need to adjust. Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology captured burned-out security teams enduring "Black October" as AI uncovers software flaws faster than defenders can patch, and Molly White traced why a $6.4 billion Binance heist pointed straight back to North Korea. Add Reddit forcing everyone to log in just to read human answers, and the open web lost another front porch. Algorithms optimize for lock-in, not discovery. Curating links by hand, and tapping share in Webnerd.ai so good writing travels further, is a great way for us to help discovery continue.

Disclosures per always: I work at Google. No doubt some of the companies mentioned here are partners, competitors or customers. Don't interpret my interest as being filtered with that lens. I built Webnerd.ai (and have no plans to monetize it).

AI writes, AI scans, and the human chair stays empty. [Image via Gemini]

We're in a funny spot with AI at the moment. As people debate its value, with one side arguing it's the greatest invention since fire, all while the other calls anything it touches pure slop, AI is actively finding a foothold in evolving how business is done, in all facets. To claim otherwise is ignorant at this point.

Software is being written more quickly with AI. Security gaps are being both exploited and solved more quickly. All matter of communication is being authored and adjusted more quickly. As I said in my first post after multiple years' hiatus, we will need to find out the best place for AI and humans to coexist, and I truly believe the discussion of AI will eventually fade to the background, just like our flareups about social, mobile, local, and whatever transformative buzzword at the moment happened to be. This is not to undercut the actual value and impact of AI, but to optimistically suggest we as humans are great at adjusting.

Our eyes and our minds have been trained since the day we were born to understand what humanity looks like. Since we all first started to learn to read or watch TV, we have absorbed what it means to be "real", and we visibly react when something feels synthetic. We all have a visceral reaction when special effects seem too special, an ad seems too perfect, or a visual defies comprehension. Something feels "off". But as the models train and get better, learning through feedback and continuous reinforcement, their images and video get better, and so does their writing.

Techmeme is aflutter this weekend about a Bloomberg report that shows where we are in this particular cat and mouse game. As AI writing becomes more human, more humans can get outed for sounding too much like AI. The end result is predictable, with people intentionally making mistakes, and writing in a way that bots won't, so they don't get accused of shortcutting their work, or leaving the hard work to an LLM. If you think the bots can't adjust to make typos on their own, or to follow instructions to sound even more human so even the bots will fail the AI detection test, well, you haven't thought this through. Maybe you've even seen the viral posts that say Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein would be considered full AI generated because the models themselves were trained on the book.

Since kicking off my first posts here two decades ago, I've had more than 3,000 posts and countless words hand typed into a myriad of open CMS windows. I've written buckets of emails or social posts and Slack messages all over the place. But I also know that in 2026, it might make sense to let the bot do a first draft, especially when it solves the blank page problem. What I do worry about, eventually, is if the AI is doing the writing, and the AI is doing the distilling and the summarizing, what if no actual humans consumed and fully took in the content? We are all very busy people, and if not, we all prefer to be seen as such, and we fill the edges of our time with things we'd rather be doing than reading text slop.

Running a script against your content to hide em dashes or add typos to seem fallible isn't going to automatically flip the lever that confirms you're a human and the AI is not. It takes an entire body of work, a corpus that no machine has, with a real personality that's adjusted through experience. 

Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote that your blog is your brand, and later, that blogging remains the foundation for who you are online. The latest generation has grown up with blogs being too slow, perhaps, with TikTok and Instagram being more visual quick hits of dopamine and long form being less valuable. Now Gen Z is approaching college and a daunting workforce where AI has always been expected and accepted, even as its place is evolving and being debated. Some of them are definitely writing their course papers with AI. Some aren't. But the reckoning won't come from somebody getting outed for asking ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to be their scribe. It will come when everyone is distracted by something more exciting and nobody was reading anyway.

Disclosures per always: I work at Google and use our Gemini and Antigravity tools a lot. I wrote this post by hand. But how would you know?

Broken links vs. paths built to endure. [Image via Gemini]

On the web, there's not much more sad than a broken link. A fundamental promise of the web, and a defining characteristic of it, has always been that you can get from one point to another, with blue underlines guiding you to the next discovery. A link that fails is a broken contract between the source and the destination. The initial author who sent you the link promised you value, and the target address didn't pay out. It's frustrating for everyone. But this expectation of permanence, that once a link is published, it works forever, has proven to be a pipe dream. 

When I debuted Webnerd.ai last weekend, the goal was pretty straightforward: bring back the fast, high-signal, human-curated morning reading ritual I loved in the heyday of classic RSS, updated for how the open web actually works in 2026. But just as much as I've enjoyed returning to that routine,  I've appreciated steering the roadmap with Antigravity. A decade plus ago, I'd point to companies that blogged weekly with their updates and bug fixes as leaders in their space, communicating to readers what was new. Now, I can make multiple updates daily, or make fixes in minutes myself -- and have even debuted a release notes section you can subscribe to from right within the app. It's an RSS inception, basically.

Over the last few weeks of living inside Webnerd.ai whenever possible, curating my shared stream and pushing links out to LG Stream on Bluesky, every "I wish it did this" or "I wonder if it could..." moment has turned into working code rapidly. Sean Goedecke, whose blog has rapidly become one of my favorites of 2026, published a piece today titled "You can just ask AI to do things", and honestly, there is no better summary of the world we live in now. If you can think it, you can build it.

Because things have moved fast since the weekend, here is a quick highlight reel of new features in Webnerd.ai right now.

First-Class Open Identity: AT Protocol OAuth, PDS Sync, and Standard.site

If you're going to build a home for the open web, you shouldn't lock people's reading identity behind a single provider. Current employer aside, I started with Google sign-in because that's what I knew. But in fast response to public request,  Sign in with Google now sits side-by-side with native Sign in with AT Protocol. Whether you use a bsky.social address or verify with your own domain like louisgray.com, you can jump straight in without extra modals or app-password gymnastics.

One click with Google, or bring your decentralized AT Protocol ID.

Even better, your decentralized identity isn't just a login badge, it carries your reading graph. Inside the OPML & Subscriptions hub, you can still drag and drop a classic XML file, or you can hit Sync PDS to pull decentralized subscription lists straight from your Personal Data Server across tools like Skyreader, Standard Reader, and Standard.site. Think about that for a second. Am I an expert on those? No. Could I work with Antigravity to build support here? Yes. So I did.

Classic OPML portability meets one-click AT Protocol PDS subscription sync.

Webnerd.ai also now speaks native at:// and standard:domain publications directly in the Subscribe dialog, and when you share a story from a Standard.site publication, Webnerd automatically writes a cryptographic site.standard.graph.recommend endorsement record to your PDS (and cleans it up if you unshare). Open standards work best when apps actually interoperate instead of just talking about it or seeing an acronymn as a checkbox.

Rescuing Newsletters from Inbox Purgatory

As much as I appreciate newsletter platforms like Substack and Beehiiv quietly keeping RSS alive under the hood, plenty of great writers still send email-only newsletters, and in my view, an email inbox sandwiched between flight confirmations, calendar invites, and shipping receipts is not the best place to read long-form writing.

Every account now gets a personal @webnerd.ai newsletter address that turns email dispatches into clean RSS feeds.

You can now open + Subscribe and switch to the new Personal Newsletters tab, and you'll find your own dedicated @webnerd.ai address. Use it when signing up for newsletters (or forward existing ones via Gmail filters or the included one-click Cloudflare Email Routing snippet), and Webnerd automatically spins up a separate, clean feed for each sender inside your Newsletters folder. Newsletters belong alongside the rest of your reading, not competing with work email.

Listening to Your Stream & Real Power-Reader Triage

Sometimes even my eyes need a break from screens, or I want to catch up on my feeds while walking the dog. Hitting the new Listen button in the top bar (or on any individual post) launches a docked audio player right at the bottom of your stream.

Listening through my morning feeds with the docked Audio & Spoken TTS queue.

If a feed item includes a native podcast or audio enclosure (flagged with an Audio badge), Webnerd plays the original audio directly; if it's a written post, it seamlessly reads the article aloud via a spoken Text-to-Speech queue with 1x to 2x playback speeds, an Up Next drawer, and automatic mark-as-read as each story finishes.

And because anyone subscribing to 100+ feeds may eventually face inbox-style bankruptcy, I've gone deep on power-reader ergonomics:

• Granular Mark-as-Read: A new split dropdown lets you clear items Older than 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, or 2 weeks, or Mark above as read as you scroll — so you can declare peace on Tuesday's news while keeping this morning's stories untouched.
• Folder & Subscription Management: You can now add, rename, drag-and-drop, delete, and merge folders inline or from a dedicated Manage Subscriptions view, toggle Newest / Oldest sort order, and pull Full Text readability views on stub feeds that only publish a sentence or two in XML.
• More Classic Themes: Alongside Cloud Nine, Warm Sepia, and OLED Black, desktop nostalgia nerds can also switch into Mac Classic, Mac OS X Aqua, BeOS, and Green Android.

AI on Your Terms — Never Between You and Your Feeds

I wrote earlier this month about how filtertainment eviscerated our informed monoculture. The whole point of an RSS reader is that you choose the sources, and nobody hides a post  because an algorithm decided outrage would keep you scrolling longer.

Where AI does shine in a reader is synthesis on demand — when you explicitly ask for it.

Optional Executive Briefings synthesize what happened across your feeds.

Tap Briefing in the toolbar (or hit B on your keyboard) and Gemini 3.8 Flash synthesizes an executive summary across your unread stream — scoped to your Last 100 items, Last 200 items, Last 12 hours, or Last 24 hours — clustering breaking storylines and citing the exact outlets in your subscriptions. Every expanded card also has an optional one-tap TL;DR button when a 4,000-word essay drops five minutes before your next meeting. AI acts as your research assistant, never your gatekeeper.

Mobile Overhaul, Instant Startup, and Eating Our Own RSS Dogfood

Under the hood, Webnerd.ai now boots through a single-round-trip bootstrap endpoint paired with a local snapshot cache for sub-16ms first-frame paint — so opening the tab feels instantaneous even on spotty mobile Wi-Fi.

On phones, we replaced cramped desktop menus with a thumb-friendly 4-tab mobile layout (Feeds, Search, Shared, and Folders), edge-swipe gestures, and a guided Add to Home Screen full-screen web app setup on iOS while I continue working on a native Android companion app - coming soon.

The redesigned four-tab mobile experience and full-screen iPhone web app.

Finally, you can't build an RSS reader and not publish your own changelog via RSS. Webnerd.ai now has an official Release Notes & Product Blog at webnerd.ai/releases, complete with a one-click + Follow in Webnerd.ai button and its own RSS feed at webnerd.ai/releases/rss.xml.

Eating our own dogfood: Webnerd.ai's product changelog lives at /releases with its own RSS feed.

If you tried Webnerd.ai over the weekend, or haven't yet, take the new audio player, newsletter inbox, or AT Protocol sync for a spin. If something bugs you or you have an idea for what an RSS reader in 2026 ought to do next, ping me on Bluesky — there's a pretty good chance Antigravity and I will have it shipped by the next weekend.

In the Web 2.0 era, I always started my day in my RSS reader. A mainstay of this blog at its peak was covering the debuts and new features from many different approaches to staying caught up on friends and the news, not just from Google Reader (RIP), but Feedly, Lazyfeed, Flipboard, TweetDeck, Shyftr, my6sense and too many others to mention.

I am not an engineer and I didn't major in computer science. There comes a point in understanding and using technology where I have a limit, and even with my years of experience in Silicon Valley, it's not impossible to run into issues that I just can't solve.

After a failed attempt a few years ago to move my blog to a new host and restart it on Wordpress, following general bit rot and content decay, the blog went completely dark -- an embarrassing development if I ever tried to point people to old stories or reference previous work, forced to look at my Blogspot backup or the Internet Archive to find some old content or try to prove my one-time relevance. 

While the world of blogging has changed in the last decade plus, my complete lack of new content wasn't an issue of a lack of ideas or a lack of time to write. It was straight up broken and I'd just about given up on getting it fixed, unwilling to turn my back on 3,000 posts only to start over somewhere else from scratch. But each attempt I'd make to run Blogger to Wordpress importers or adjust DNS settings failed. Until I turned to Antigravity.

My initial prompt that started the rebuild.

Antigravity is Google's AI-centric software development platform - very similar to Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex. Each of those products has its own champions, but the purpose is roughly the same. Simplify the ability for people to create, and leverage the latest models to understand user intent quickly and build smartly. I use Antigravity all the time at work, so with the new Googlebook being designed explicitly for working with Gemini, I thought I'd ask Antigravity to tackle this major project, and it didn't blink.

Rebuilding the blog, to me, meant fixing everything.

My expectations were initially low, as they often are after having tried the same thing over and over and gotten absolutely nowhere. I told Antigravity I wanted to rebuild the blog at the same domain and bring along my 3,000+ posts, along with all the images I'd used in those posts. I also needed to not just recreate a frozen point in time, where I had left off in 2019, but have a foundation to keep going. I didn't expect it to work, and I definitely didn't expect it to work so quickly.

Antigravity asked me a few questions, such as where my domain was currently hosted, if I had my Blogger archive from Google Takeout (I did), and how I wanted my domain setup. As Antigravity, using Gemini, churned away, it very quickly sussed out exactly how to solve my DNS issues and found me a new host in Cloudflare, which enabled easy read/write from Antigravity, and we were able to import my blog history. Not only did it very confidently tell me what was needed, but it guided me to which pages and options to choose from, both in my old host and my new one, that I needed to get what I wanted.

After seven years without posts and years of the domain just absolutely not working, I had my blog back to life, with all historical posts, in about two hours.

With that major milestone out of the way, I asked Antigravity how I was supposed to make new posts, and did my Cloudflare installation come with a content management system (CMS)? Reader, it did not.

Showing a blog CMS while in the CMS is so meta, but Antigravity built this.
Antigravity didn't miss a beat, saying, would you like me to build one for you? I said yes. So it made one. I logged in and saw it didn't have any of my old posts automatically saved, as I would have expected. Not a problem. I asked Antigravity to add them, and it did. I had gone from a totally dead domain and buried blog to a live domain and a blank slate to start over and make new posts again, without any missing history. I was no longer blocked.

From there, the only limitations have been what I ask for. Like any good blogger, I got to optimizing the look and feel of the site right away, asking Antigravity to feed me some new modern layouts and color palettes for 2026. I asked it to build in full-feed RSS, to supporting subscriptions and the open web. It rebuilt all my static pages, my yearly archives, and keeps a live count of total posts from my very first attempts back in 2006. It added a native commenting system and imported conversations from decades past, successfully. Antigravity also understood my previous style, and we've stuck with my tradition of the 125 x 125 image at the top left of posts to signal what each post is about.

Should something surprise me, or act in a way I didn't expect, I just go back to my ongoing conversation with Antigravity, and provide that feedback -- if posts aren't displaying how I expected, if numbers don't change, or basic functionality, like saving drafts in the CMS, had been missing from the first round.

The speed of creation and iteration and improvement is really unprecedented, and hasn't required daunting technology hassles. As I come up with ideas for the blog's functionality or its CMS, I just ask Antigravity. If Antigravity needs approval for permissions, I get the option to grant or deny them, and often found Antigravity giving me options to choose from, with a give and take that always leaves me in control.

Antigravity understands my input and takes action, with intentional follow-up.

Like I wrote last week, the opportunity to use natural language to simply build, or what some call "vibe coding", is changing our relationship with developers. If you can think it you can build it. Spoiled by my work environment, I was excited to see Gemini 4.0 (Argon) make its way into Antigravity this last week, making my conversations around this project (and others) even more in depth. And before you ask, yes, I pay for Google's AI Ultra subscription, and no, I don't have a discount. Having Antigravity available to me, with the latest models, baked into my Googlebook, is an absolute must in 2026.

I took my Twitter account private four years ago. It's over.

A common refrain through the rise of social media in the Web 2.0 surge was that "you are who you follow". Your personal choices of what you post and who you engage with are an echo of your personality and your interests, and it becomes a reinforcing loop. The people you follow select what you choose to consume, and what they share becomes part of what you believe to be true. An extension of that view is that "you are where you engage" and where you choose to engage is as much a descriptor at this point as the people you engage with -- especially as large-scale social networks and platforms have increasingly been identified with specific political leanings, or, unfortunately, their billionaire owners.

The Human–AI Co-Creation Studio [Image via Gemini]

As a teen training to get my driver's license, my dad wanted me to learn "the right way". To him, that mean getting my first experiences behind the wheel with a stick shift, learning how to coax his sturdy and unimpressive 1990s era Mazda 323, with manual transmission, from low gear to highway cruising speeds, all while avoiding stalls and switching gears smoothly. Through this training, many trial and errors were had as I gained experience.

Eventually, I took and passed the drivers' test, but in an automatic vehicle - my mom's wood paneled Oldsmobile station wagon. Despite its heavy build and thoroughly unattractive appearance, the car's automatic transmission reduced complexity for me, letting me focus on driving the car, not just fighting to get it to work. Now, depending on which survey you choose, less than 1/5th of drivers know how to use a manual transmission, and those cars account for only 2% of all sales in the United States. While there will always be strong opinions about the efficiency or quality of manual vs automatic, from a technology perspective, it's a relic of a previous era.

The rapid ascent of AI-assisted coding, much like that transition from manual transmission to automatic, has reduced complexity and expanded the total market for participants -- not only changing how software engineers work, but making it possible for those without coding experience to speak their ideas into existence, and iterate to make them real. If you can think it, you can build it.

While some debate if AI is conscious or sentient (it's not), it certainly isn't yet fully autonomous. Working with any of the leading AI-powered code environments is a continual give and take between the LLM and the human, a hybrid approach Sean Goedecke calls our "centaur age", reflecting the reality of a time when the machines are so fast and so capable, humans can't directly compete alone but work in tandem with their silicon partners.

Goedecke says: 

"It is no longer possible to credibly argue that an unassisted software engineer can beat a centaur team. The value provided by coding agents is just too great: not just the speed of producing code, but the speed of review and testing."
-- Software's centaur age may last decades

What I have experienced, both at the office, and in my own side projects, is that AI isn't just changing the end product of what we build, or speeding our ability to eliminate tasks -- but more importantly, enabling us to do things we simply were unable to before, expanding our scope and redefining what we could achieve. In the last three years, we've graduated from simple question and answer chatbots to progressively capable workspaces that are waiting to take our instructions, and agents eager to do our bidding.

Two major pillars feeding my views on technology since the beginning of the Web 2.0 era have been especially consistent: first, there is no information overload, as you control the levers of what you view and engage with, and second, true personalized feeds that you understand and prefer over a chronological or curated experience are ideal. You should be delighted and informed from the content you engage with. It shouldn't feel uninvited, and it shouldn't feel strange to you. Yet the last decade-plus, as many services, applications, devices, channels, and influencers have fought for our attention, and we have become deeply aware of how tailored algorithms have changed to keep us engaged, we have given in to quick hits of entertainment instead of deep information.

The dizzying array of podcasts, newsletters, TikToks, Instagram Reels, subreddits, Spotify recommendations, YouTubers and Twitch streamers, all asking us to tune in, like and subscribe has ensured we don't have a common thread of media consumption, a shared reality and foundation for discussion with a common experience. It became inevitable, as I predicted this attention crisis back in 2010, saying there was "no off button, ever", with our devices "in a state of constant connectivity." When given a choice between bitter truths and dopamine, we as a population have been begging for the sweet stuff every time.

Each revolution in media creation and consumption has followed technological innovation that enabled it. It took the printing press to make books cheap and abundant, leading to a sharp rise in literacy five-plus centuries ago. The telegraph, the radio, the television followed. Eventually, the Web.

Constant connectivity, infinite choice. [Image via Gemini]

Initially a simple text medium with low quality images and buffering sound, the Web later expanded to include video, though not great at first. As bandwidths increased at home and at work, and wireless broadband became ubiquitous, we have always found a way to fill the container. As those containers filled, the media consuming them evolved as well, from static text sites we discovered through links and forwarded emails, to user generated content, up to the high fidelity real time multi-camera experiences we can experience today from practically anywhere.

The Gen Z early career entrants to today's work force have only known a world where everything is available all the time, on demand, where anybody can become famous for a moment, and being an influencer is a totally normal thing. Their first phones were smartphones. They never had to know what channel something was on, or when it aired. For them, news channels have always been 24/7 and hyper partisan, with no need to wait around for evening updates that just recapped everything they might have already seen online.

As Garbage Day (no really, that's the name of it) has pointed out regularly, the monoculture has essentially gone away. Even the top songs topping the Spotify charts seem foreign. We don't all participate in the same trends. We don't follow the same people. Even as people vainly wished the web would bring us together to shared experiences, I knew twenty years ago the web would enable us to retreat to safe spaces with like minded individuals. When given the chance to participate with people who agree with us and share our views, we will choose them, instead of engaging with communities we may not enjoy or feel contentious.

The vast array of choices, and our decision tree, means our small sliver of space is uniquely our own. Fatigued by the real world, people have found comfort in the hamster wheel of short form videos, memeification of pretty much everything, and the collapse of discussions to finding the perfect reaction emoji as the smallest gesture available to avoid leaving the other party on read. As we see everyone with their earbuds in, staring at their phones, flipping from one piece of content to the next, vaguely approximating the humans in Wall-E, we get it. It's the result of the containers, the personalization, and the need to feel connected and entertained. The apps do an incredible job of giving you what you want. If they didn't, you would find another way to kill the time.

Let's talk about the Camp Fire for a second. My family moved to Paradise in 1991, as I was starting 8th grade. I lived there through high school, until heading to college. The family stayed until all kids had graduated high school - the last in 2004.



While news has referred to Paradise as isolated, we actually were moving from an even smaller town. I'd spent elementary school in Brownsville in Yuba County. When my dad got a new medical practice in Paradise, we were blown away by the McDonald's and "all those power lines".


I only spent one year in the Paradise school district, before my mom got a job teaching at Chico Jr. High. Through high school, I spent every early morning at church in seminary, and then driving down the Skyway to Pleasant Valley High School.


Paradise was always a retirement community. My dad's work was primarily elder care - geriatrics. Sometimes they died. More than once, I accompanied my dad to the coroner's office while on rounds. As he said, either their heart stopped, or they stopped breathing. Circle of life.

But that didn't mean death by other means was impossible. Fire was by far the top concern for the community. Paradise is located on a ridge in the foothills, placed squarely between two canyons. When fire would light, it would often head for the city.

In 1992, my sophomore year of high school, we evacuated twice. See the @ChicoER's coverage of those fires. Notice one of those started -- you guessed it -- at the Skyway. The problem with this, of course, is that was the main road out of town.


In 1992, even as we had yet to unpack from evacuating the first time, ash started to fall on our driveway and house. Thick, black smoke loomed above us, and the fire was closer than ever. Some firebug, in copycat mode, had lit a blaze near city limits. We left again.

Luckily, as with every other time, the fire crews did an amazing job stopping the flames from getting deep into town. We marveled at the burn scars that approached neighbors' property, but didn't take any homes or casualties. Some have argued Paradise is a woodsy town that had no business building where it did. But it's not all the thick forest you may have in your mind.


Long after I left to college and embedded in Silicon Valley, there have been other fires. As with those in the early 1990s, most were stopped. And as @Weather_West and others have reported, there were many plans in place to protect residents if worst-case happened.


So what made the Camp Fire different? How did the above map turn into this scar on the North state? In addition to the exceptionally low humidity and the high winds (which can't be discounted), I'd say the origin of the fire played a huge part.


Previous fires, which started by Skyway or the canyons, and slowly meandered their way to the city, gave residents and firefighters warning. People had time to pack and leave, and routes were not frantic. The Camp Fire was a sneak attack with brutal force.

The Camp Fire didn't start on the lower Paradise side. It started in Pulga, an even tinier community. It started in the more woodsy side, where topology made it nearly impossible to stop, in starved fuel-laden forests, powered by ferocious winds and drought.


The winds pushed the fire into the main part of town, to all the people and all the businesses, and it hasn't stopped. Adventist Health Hospital, where my dad worked, was among the first to go.

When @Weather_West shared a tweet from @Gloria2marie, showing fire South and West of Paradise, I immediately realized the town was gone. In a Slack message to a friend, I wrote:


Classy, I know. But not wrong.

The casualty totals, surpassing all records in California, have not been a surprise. Knowing the aging, slow, immobile population, many who don't drive, and the speed of this fire, we're lucky thousands did not perish. But the loss is still stunning.

That an entire town can be zapped off a map is practically unprecedented. And for those who want to go back... to what exactly? No infrastructure. No power. No water. No cell service. And possibly human remains waiting for you.

Chico, where I went to high school, has for the most part escaped the direct flames. But now the refugees from Paradise are encamped at the town Walmart, a drier, more outdoor version of the Lousiana Superdome during Katrina. Thousands have nowhere to go.

More than 52,000 people have been evacuated since the Camp Fire erupted in Paradise on Thursday, packing parking lots, shelters and hotels across Northern California, and straining the housing stock.

There are still hundreds missing. So many are unaccounted for that law enforcement is releasing names in batches to avoid overload. Imagine that. The fire was so intense, many people may never be found -- incinerated and returned to the dust.

The Camp Fire is not just another news story or a set of headlines, or an unfortunate reason the Bay Area is smoky. It's a remarkable human and modern disaster.



I've read some ridiculous tin foil hat conspiracies on Twitter that you wouldn't believe about how the Camp Fire started. You could say this type of fire was inevitable, but also preventable. Of course climate change played a role. Of course the town makeup played a role.

Either way, this is a conversation we are going to keep having in California, and throughout the Western US and beyond. Is Lake Tahoe safe? Is Sunnyvale? Last year Napa found out the hard way. My grandparents' home in Redding was threatened in the Carr Fire.

It's reality.

This isn't a "feel sorry for us" thread. It's been a while, and my whole family is safe. But they are active in connecting with those who stayed. The woman who prayed her way to safety in a firey ride you may have seen on @Gizmodo was a high school friend I've heard pray before.

This was the last photo I took in Paradise, in May 2015, when I took my boys to a party for my brother's child - their cousin. The home that looks like it was under construction a few short years ago... it's gone now, to dust and ash.

As you lament the bad air and see the numbers rise ever upward, I hope this helps remove the abstract from what seems like a tiny town far away. Like the Woolsey Fire and the Carr Fire and all the others, your home could be the next hashtag. Have a plan.

Web content has typically divided into three camps - those who create, those who react, and those who just watch. The lurkers, if you will. From the very earliest days of blogging, those first posts awaited the inevitable comments, and, given a clear revenue stream, you would see early participants like Fred Wilson say that "comments are how bloggers get paid."

[Source: https://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-real-value-of-social-media-interaction/#comment-2531]

The earliest engagements we had with people who read our site gave us incredible discussions, and spawned more posts and even, in rare cases, changed minds. Sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and others became known for their diverse threads, and those in the comments are why you showed up.

But we've also seen the pendulum swing the other way. Everybody knows to "never read the comments" on popular news sites, as the most aggressive vitriol and ignorance floats to the top. YouTube comments have long been notorious for their lack of quality (though I feel this has improved of late). And Twitter, for many who should be able to use the platform, their every move can attract trolls who have a vendetta to take them down - but somehow don't get banned.

As social media sites eclipsed the momentum of blogs, conversations moved. We adapted by integrating social discussions from FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter and appended them to our blogs. We would all share our posts on social, and then engage where the content landed. The best bloggers would find their readers wherever they were. But others simply turned comments off. Maybe it is because they were full of spam (they were) or the quality wasn't there (often true), but also, because the total quantity declined.

Let's go back to talking about Twitter. Twitter drives me nuts because it's fantastic and so poor at so many things. They seriously have real-time on lockdown. There is no better place to see what is happening right now. If there's a calamity, search Twitter. A breaking news event? Search Twitter. A sporting event? Twitter.

But Twitter has this awful habit of giving all users an equal voice. Now hear me out what I mean.

If you tweet publicly, anybody who you haven't blocked can reply, and their content is appended to your tweet. It follows you around. If a Republican politician posts, left-leaning posters race to take down their message, while the MAGA crowds prop it up and try to gain eyeballs. If the Kardashians say something, the crowds pounce on the valuable real estate quickly to show their adoration or pimp whatever link they've got going.

And down the publicity food chain, if you're a woman, especially a visible one, you get awful men saying foolish things. I guarantee it. They may call you names or question your ability. You block one and ten more pop up. If you're black, or Jewish, the racists will find you. They all know how to tweet.

So what I recommend above all other Twitter changes is the ability for people to reclaim their space. Hillary and Trump should both be able to post information without the crowd's replies being appended. Just like blogs and YouTube stars can turn comments off, Twitter users should be able to as well. The thing about social networks (and most products, to be honest) is that you should give the users control. But they haven't done it, and I think it delivers a great disservice to the platform, which has become a hotbed of harassment and hate - as Reddit and others have too.

If you can trust your commenters enough to give them a voice, by all means, amplify their voices. But when they have shown you time and again that they cannot be trusted, turn it off.

My first two years in Silicon Valley were spent in Burlingame at a dotcom that hoped to revolutionize telecommunicatons online - with Web meetings, conference calls and even faxing from the Web. They had great services, but not enough customers, and eventually ran out of funding in early 2001, jettisoning marketing, sales and business development folks, before selling for scraps to Oracle.

Being in Marketing myself, this meant it was my first trial to try and find a full-time job, in a world where online job databases were taking over. I'd polished the resume and started applying at anything that sounded close to what I thought I did...

Web Marketing Manager... E-Marketing Manager... Marketing Manager... Internet Marketing Manager...

Keep in mind this was a time when companies knew the Internet was a humongous deal, but were still trying to figure out where the money was coming from. The dotcom stocks had gone to the moon and crashed down. E-Business firms were raising tens of millions to figure out how put supply chains on the Web, and it could be hard to separate the real from the fake.

Meanwhile, with the crush of aspiring gold-seekers flooding to the Valley, hoping to win the stock option lottery, traffic was a mess. I used to compare driving 101 South to parallel parking at 70 miles an hour -- just a zoo. So very quickly, the location of where I could start was just about as important as the starting salary. Belmont was better than Palo Alto. Mountain View better than San Jose. Maybe I could even walk.

I tweaked my CV as best I could and threw it on Monster and Dice.com and all their clones, hoping to break through the noise. Here's what Dice.com looked like back then.



One of my job hunting volleys reached a company who so obviously needed my help. Their website was this hideous reddish purple and their icon looked like a squished crow. But they promised big things with revolutionary shock waves. I applied for the role of eMarketing Manager, to aid with promotion and copy, and redo their Website.

They asked me to come in for an interview and I pored over their site, ready to talk about how they needed to tailor their content for who their visitors would be -- investors, partners, analysts, and yes, customers. I studied the site in and out and felt prepared.



That Monday, sure their headquarters was in some garage somewhere, with like maybe 5-8 guys who couldn't write, I rolled in ready to tell them the ins and outs of marketing and publishing on the web. I pulled into the parking lot on Bernardo in Mountain View. Across their lot was Placeware, the Web meeting company eventually purchased by Microsoft. And one building down -- Handspring, the exciting handheld company run by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky in their follow-on from Palm.

Instead of less than a dozen people, Synaxia had a quiet swarm of folks. About 50 were in Mountain View, and they'd raised two rounds of funding, for about $35 million. I still didn't really know what they did.

The first interviewer, a director of product marketing, and I went back and forth as I kept sounding confused as to their promise. He said they made the Web faster with specialized network servers. I thought they competed with Akamai. He said no. Maybe Akamai would be a customer? No. I felt a little stuck, as he talked about host bus adapters, raid arrays, and fibre channel.

So I went to what I knew - Web sites. As I began my spiel, he shook his head and stopped me.

"Louis, the Web site is a fake. The company name is a fake. In two months, we're going to rebrand and launch our product, so none of this matters."


I felt like my legs had been pulled out from under me, that I may as well just leave, but I was young enough (and likely cheap enough) that they didn't give up on me, even as I got through two more people.

My final interview was a friendly, older, and heavier guy, with short cropped white hair, folded arms resting on his belly, and an ability to talk your ear off. He was the vice president of marketing. I had 30 minutes with him, and for 20 minutes or so, he yammered on about the state of Catholic high school athletics, and told me about his kids, or told me stories about his career. He seemed very nice, but I was scared he wouldn't get a chance to learn about me at all - let alone figure if I was worth hiring.

Before I had felt like I even had a chance to get a word in edgewise, he interrupted, and said, "Look, if you got to me, you'll be fine," and just as quickly, he was gone -- off to the next meeting.


Years later, he would constantly tell me how he had been the reason I was hired, that I had been his discovery, and he took all the credit for my accomplishments. A fantastic boss, but an even better story teller.

A few days later, I got a call that offered me the job. I had no idea, really, what kind of salary to ask for, but, having just finished my double major from Berkeley, and getting two years under my belt, I was looking at a 50% raise over my last job. It seemed like so much money -- commensurate with being able to deliver a brand new website in about 30 days (which my designer and I managed).

I agreed to the job, and the pay bump, and my excitement lasted almost a full workday.

On the first day, HR asked me to sign papers to complete my employment, and I added my signature with enthusiasm. I walked back to the HR manager's desk, and she opened a folder titled "E-marketing manager". The first page in the folder was a job description (mine) with a salary range.

The bottom of that salary range was above where I had signed, and the top of that range went a full $30,000 higher. I immediately felt like I was underpaid, and I'd have to work a decade before I felt like I'd caught up. But I managed to get the job at the stealth company, and their fake website -- lasting 8 1/2 years, until I left in 2009.



Above is one of the last real ones I published, after multiple generations of product and many hundreds of customers. (And eight bosses. I outlasted everyone I interviewed with)

Editor’s Note: Part 12 in an irregular series of stories from my many years in Silicon Valley. Part 11 talked about the time I got called into HR's office to meet with lawyers over industrial espionage. This time, a story involving gray hat search engine marketing in the early days of the Web.

DMOZ is now closed.

Believe it or not, before the world of automated spiders that crawled the entire Web and ranked the results for your searches, much of the way we found content on the Internet was thanks to manual updates from an invisible army of directory editors. Yahoo! defined the initial dot-com era, with its hierarchical oracle making or breaking traffic downstream, as sites were organized and shuffled into categories by unseen text tweakers, much like the editors of Wikipedia try and keep its tens of millions of article pages up to date, with a seemingly fluid mass of edits to keep the live encyclopedia current.

But Yahoo! wasn't the only Web directory. Rich Skrenta and others, also behind Web 2.0 efforts Topix and Blekko, introduced the Open Directory Project, referred to as DMOZ, for it was hosted on the directory subdomain of the Mozilla.org site, with an objective of harnessing contributions from around the world (like Wikipedia), to build a directory, similar to Yahoo!, that could plug into any site that wanted to host one. In a time when many sites were seeking Internet traffic and riches by acting as the front page for the Web, attaching the open directory project to your portal could give you an edge and not require you to bring on a ton of staff.

As with Yahoo!'s directory, a company's inclusion in the DMOZ directory could act as a binary gate as to whether or not potential users would find you. In 1999, working as a Web marketing manager for a Web startup that offered internet faxing and conference calls, I found myself irked to see that our services were not included in DMOZ. Making things worse, the categories I would expect to see us listed in seemed slapped together and without an official owner. Given my understanding of the space and knowing our many competitors, I registered an account and requested to moderate the relevant category.

The DMOZ Internet Fax Listings from 1999 (via Archive.org)

Not too long afterward, I was given the option to update the category, including those of our competitors. As it was nearly two decades ago, I honestly don't remember if I used my company email or a Yahoo! email or equivalent, but I didn't try and disguise where I worked. My application had gotten through.

FaxCube from the year 2000.

When I did log in, I found the content in a state of abandonment. There wasn't much you could do with a site's listing. Give it a title, a link, and a short description, literally about a dozen words. It was fairly impossible to differentiate services from one another, especially in a commoditized space where the core function was pretty straight forward. But I cleaned up the descriptions for all the entries, including our competitors, to accurately display their offerings. Some offered email to fax services, while others offered the reverse. Some offered broadcast faxing. Some required a proprietary fax viewer, and others were completely Web based. That kind of thing.

When content was edited in DMOZ, edits would later propagate downstream. Sure enough, my colleagues noticed a spike in Web traffic to our main sites, with referrers coming from all the places DMOZ was set up. For no cost, I had a clear impact in our customer acquisition funnel, and maintaining the DMOZ became part of my ongoing work.

Later, DMOZ added the option to highlight two entries in the group, which were solely up to the moderator. This, of course, gave me the option to expand from a gray area, to clearly going over the line into promotion. It went without saying I thought our service was the best, and highlighted it at the top. I also chose to highlight a partner site (the Netscape Fax Center) that was white labeling our service, essentially the 1 and 1A positions.

This got even better when we soon realized DMOZ was fueling search results for AOL. The more people who searched for Internet Faxing on AOL, the better we were to see results.

DMOZ listings for Internet Telephony in early 2000. (Via Archive.org)

In early 2000, we introduced a new Web based conference call and meeting product. Addicted to the free traffic from DMOZ, my team asked me to see if I could get our content similarly included on whatever the equivalent was for Internet conferencing. I poked around, and, again, applied to be an editor for the Internet Telephony page. It wasn't a perfect fit, but it was pretty good.

Again, I got approved, and again, I added our sites, and again, I promoted our main site and a partner site to be included as the pair at the top of results. Again, we started to get plenty of Web traffic from DMOZ and its downstream partners, accounting for more than double digit percentage of our traffic to both properties. But this time, it wouldn't last long. Maybe it was the clear marketing copy promoting both services, but one day, I logged in and saw our service demoted to the standard results, with another in its place. I reversed the change, and it wasn't too long until there was a debate upstream as to whether these listings were in good faith.

PhoneCube, in all its glory, from 2000.

Not too long afterward, my moderation rights had been removed from both sections. I'd essentially been fired from my side job of gray hat SEO, long before most of us knew what that meant. And yes, my engineering peers lamented the loss of traffic, as our more organic listings, on AOL search and elsewhere, didn't carry as much weight, once we became one of the fold.

Had I just stayed content to include our services in the listings, or even just to stay a moderator of the less exciting Internet faxing space, it's possible I could have been editing text descriptions for our sites and our competitors indefinitely. But pushing our own products and our partner sites turned out too good to be true. The "Wild West" Internet traffic rush didn't last forever, and, as it turns out, neither did our products. I was laid off after we couldn't get a funding round closed at the beginning of 2001, and a few months later, the company was parceled off to become part of Oracle (see 2006 post). Some of my colleagues still work there nearly two decades later. As for DMOZ, it too shut down a few years ago, a relic in the world of Google and Facebook.

Disclosures: This whole post is a disclosure! I worked at 3Cube during this time. I work at Google now, a perceived competitor to whatever Yahoo! and AOL call themselves now. And as I work on Google Analytics, this is not a post about SEO to all you SEO/SEM folks.

This looks like an ad. But it's just a few recent Chromebooks.

The 2013 Chromebook Pixel (version 1)

People are constantly on their phones. All day.

There's a flurry of debate over whether smartphones and their apps have become too addicting. While there is no complete agreement over how often smartphone users access their phones each day, estimates put the number at anywhere from 80 to 150 times. If you're a typical human who is awake about 16 hours a day, that's five to ten accesses per hour. Every hour. You might even put your own estimate much higher, or, instead, see it as one long continuous touch that consumes the entire day.

Independent of the discussion of whether this is a "good thing" or not, the ability to constantly engage with one's phone, checking messages from different apps, getting the latest news instantly, window shopping or achieving a new high score, the device has virtually eliminated the opportunity to be bored - acting as the glue that connects times when you're otherwise active. The smartphone acts as a space filler and a constant alternative for whatever else you might be doing.

Not too long ago, there was something we recognized as a quiet space between activities. Mental breaks. Whether that was standing at a corner for the light at the intersection to go green and allow us to cross the street, or taking an escalator at the mall, or waiting for the bus, we recognized those gaps as something like boredom. Was there nothing on TV? Bored. Forced to wait in line at the supermarket? Bored. Finished your book? Bored. Is the baseball season over? Bored for four months.

Think people aren't constantly on their phones while driving? Think again.

But this isn't the case now. If you look around at people, everyone is seemingly in a state of constant engagement with their phones. Drivers at intersections waiting for red lights to turn are waiting for cues from the cars next to them to indicate the signal has changed. Pedestrians are walking with their feet slightly askew to avoid unseen stumbles, and draft behind the people ahead of them, one hand holding the phone at an angle, looking up every few steps for potential surprise. Those waiting for the bus only interrupt their phone use to glance up and see if their ride is on its way.

Many a word has been spilled about how smartphones have invaded daily lives. Couples go to restaurants and read their phones instead of talking to one another. Colleagues may glance at their phones and tweet while you're talking to them, looking up on occasion to see if whatever you're saying is more interesting than whatever popped up on their screen. It's no longer a challenge to find something to do. Instead, it's a battle to see who can be the most sensational or carry enough weight to trump the alternative that is constantly available on a 4 or 5 inch screen.

Often, when presenting to rooms full of people at events, I see attendees on their phones. It's been years since you could authoritatively demand a 'laptops down' meeting and expect to get everyone's full attention. That people are going to try and deliver continuous parallel attention is a reality, and you are in a constant battle to earn their mind share, in a hope that your engagement will be more lasting and more significant than what their phone has selected to bring to the fore.

In the last decade plus, more of what we used to depend on full sized computers, cameras, televisions, maps and more has been miniaturized and made portable in our pocket. This has allowed our entertainment, learning and communications machines, our commerce engines... to be constantly with us. People meet their soulmates on their phone. They get paid on the phone. They can order food and have it delivered, all from their phone. If life's every important value, to consume, to share and to survive, can be designed and managed from your phone, it really begs the question of whether the world within the screen is less valuable than the one on the outside of it.

My own kids, still under 10, don't yet have phones. It's already challenging as a parent to provide them the structure they need to learn independently and prioritize work over entertainment, without giving them a magic device that does it all in their pocket constantly. But they do know they live in a world where boredom is a practical impossibility, and where everything is practically a request away.

Life moves faster now, and it isn't boring. That's no longer an option.