Some Personal News: I’ve been an avid reader Flaming Hydra since its inception in late 2020. Flaming Hydra is one of the few bright spots in our ever-dimming media landscape. A bunch of great writers decided “fuck it. We’re going to form our own collective. Everyone will contribute one essay per month, and we’ll charge a $3/month subscription fee. There is an audience for great writing, this doesn’t have to be complicated.”
The Flaming Hydra crew has expanded their ranks and… well… I’m one of the new contributors! I am going to try to be chill about this. I will not manage to be chill about it. This is so fucking cool.
They published my first essay, “A New Guy For Us All to Be Mad At” last night. It’s about the history of PayPal, and the sheer incompetence of young Musk and Thiel.
The main character of the essay is Bill Harris, who you have probably never heard of. Harris was hired to be CEO of young Elon’s X-dot-com (the dotcom-era payment company, not the present-day child porn/white nationalist content creation machine). As the lone “adult in the room,” he was annoyingly competent at his job. He engineered the merger of Elon’s X and Peter Thiel/Reid Hoffman/David Sacks’s Confinity. That landed them a $100 million Series C funding round, just days before the dotcom bubble well and truly popped. Without Bill Harris, the deal collapses, the funding round doesn’t come through, and both companies become casualties of the dotcom crash.
Here’s a little thought experiment: imagine you have a time machine, and it is your job to find the smallest historical event that, by changing it, reorders the course of human events for the better. My current candidate would be “go back to March 2000 and give Bill Harris a mild case of the flu.” Nothing too extreme. Just, like, a week or so on Nyquil. We’ve all been there.
That’s a parallel world where Bill Harris is stuck phoning it in at work, and Musk and Thiel have to be normal for a week or else their companies collapse (difficulty level: impossible). Here’s an accurate rendering of the result:
Dammit, Bill Harris. We could have had it all.
A few other links and notes from the week:
(1) I felt a bit of honest-to-goodness hope reading Julia Angwin’s column this week. (Check out John Herrman, too.) Meta just lost two court cases about the impacts of its design features on social media users. The cost of those cases is barely a rounding error for Meta, but it also represents a potentially serious change to the status quo. Section 230 has provided blanket protections to the tech monopolies. The blanket is fraying.
I’m generally of the opinion that we are better off with Section 230 than without it. But, also, Silicon Valley has an iron grip on basically two branches of the government right now. And things are getting worse all over the place. The courts are starting to treat Meta like Philip Morris. That’s something to work with. I’ll take it.
(2) OpenAI is shutting down Sora. Lol. LMAO even. I’m not ready to declare this a turning point for the AI bubble (though it is still giving Enron, y’all). But OpenAI itself is looking more and more like a sinking ship. Disney’s $1 billion investment is toast. OpenAI’s near-term finances run on futurity. It only works if it seems inevitable.
On a related note, I have started gathering threads for a piece with the working title “Dario-Wario." Dario Amodei is pretty clearly replacing Sam Altman as the standard bearer for the generative AI revolution. So I’ve been trying to work out exactly what to make of Amodei. He is, I think, clearly less-bad than Altman. But that doesn’t mean he is necessarily good or trustworthy.
More on that soon(ish).
(3) The Giving Pledge has become a punchline. [Sean Parker in The Social Network voice]: “giving away trillions of dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Claiming you will give away trillions of dollars, basking in the credit for years, and then just… keeping the money.” Who could have ever seen this, the most obvious turn of events, coming?
We’re going to have to tax the hell out of the billionaires. Not taxing the billionaires was a mistake. Believing that the billionaires would collectively, voluntarily give their wealth to good causes was a mistake. There are a handful of exceptions (MacKenzie Scott deserves at least a few statues when the histories of this era get written), and/but all of the good billionaires would, by definition, approve of taxing the hell out of the billionaires.
(4) I’ve been reading Ben Recht’s book, The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us. It is excellent. I’m not sure if I’ll write a full review, but you should really put it on your reading list.
I’ve also been reading Francis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch. It is such a goddamn treat. Apologies to all other novelists publishing books in 2026. Spufford is going to be my favorite novel of the year. You’re all competing for second place.
I read Project Hail Mary over the weekend. I haven’t seen the film yet. I… viscerally hated the book. I might write something longer about it. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum — the book just belongs to a genre of whiz-bang science solves everything fiction that, it turns out, is extremely not my cup of tea. But I feel the urge to think a little harder in public about why it is so not my cup of tea. We’ll have to see.
That’s all from me. Thanks for reading. Have a nice weekend.
-DK