Three medium-sized thoughts to share today:
I teach a class every spring semester called “History and the Digital Future.” This is the class that came out of the WIRED project. We read old magazine articles, discuss what the digital revolution looked like back then, and see what lessons we can glean from the imaginary futures that never arrived.
It is my favorite class to teach. I figure out something new every time.
The ah-hah moment this past semester came while we were discussing Kevin Kelly’s 2005 essay, “We Are the Web.” This is actually my favorite Kevin Kelly piece (mostly because he spends time reflecting on stuff he got wrong in the 1990s, and I’m an absolute sucker for self-critical retrospectives). We Are the Web examines three time periods: 1995, 2005, and an imagined 2015. It is a classic Web 2.0 essay, positively brimming with the excitement about online community participation that defined internet culture in that era.
Here’s how Kelly imagines the future, circa 2015:
2015: The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.
What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical – but in favor of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer?
No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.
There’s a nice puzzle to unwind here. Reading that first paragraph, it strikes me that Kelly is at least a little bit right. In 2026, we kind of do live in a world where, on average, everyone is more-or-less an online writer of sorts. If you count Twitter/X and Instagram and TikTok, we are absolutely awash in content. This is the world of social media streams, and it is a different world, a different culture, than what came before. Kevin Kelly saw this abundance coming, and tried to take seriously what marvels it would portend.
Except… well… when I ask my students “was Kevin Kelly right?”, they all get pained looks on their faces, glancing around the room to see who is going to step up and try to articulate the disconnect. What emerges is that Kelly was right about the abundance of content, but the abundance was beside the point.
You can see the tension emerge by focusing on the second and third paragraphs. Everyone isn’t busy uploading far more than they download (or, today, stream). Even the biggest bluesky sickos <raises hand> read far more than they post. A great many people still sit back and veg out, only occasionally contributing to the maelstrom. And the audience absolutely does matter online, because that’s where the money is.
What Kevin Kelly couldn’t see in 2005, because he was focusing on the new abundance, was that attention was about to become the dominant scarce resource. Hence, the attention economy. Hence Google/YouTube and Facebook becoming multi-trillion dollar businesses by algorithmically sorting attention and selling ads against the eyeballs.
He also couldn’t see that, once the money got big, content creation would stop becoming defined by scrappy amateur “prosumers,” and would instead become defined by the influencer industry. Hustlers would go on to make millions gaming the algorithms. Those are the defining features of the digital culture my students inhabit. The new abundance was just a starting point. The new scarcity was what defined the boundaries of both culture and industry.
This strikes me as a common mistake among tech futurists. It is relatively easy to tell a story that says (1) our society has been defined by this one scarce resource. (2) But technology is about to make that resource abundant. This changes everything. (3) Just imagine the wonderful possibilities once this new era of abundance has arrived.
They’re missing a critical fourth step: (4) With every new abundance, there will be a new scarcity. And how we manage that scarcity will tell us what sort of society we will be living in. Look toward the scarcity, not the abundance.
This all goes double for the AI future. SpaceX went public today.
Elon Musk is a trillionaire now, and his Space/AI/Social Media company is worth something like $2.2 trillion, with revenues of around negative $4 billion. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed to go public as well. Anthropic has had one profitable quarter, OpenAI has hahahahaha who are we kidding? OpenAI isn’t even trying to turn a profit. Why would they bother attempting to make more money than they spend? That isn’t how financial capitalism even works anymore.
These companies sell stories about the digital future to investors who give them money in exchange for shares of their storytelling company. These shares can be re-sold at a later date to some greater fool, often at a profit. SpaceX is worth $170/share today, not because investors broadly believe the company will generate several trillion in revenues, but because investors narrowly believe they will find someone who will buy their shares for at least $171/share at some later date.
The stories these companies tell about the digital future all revolve around abundance. And they are, if you have spent a few years studying this stuff, just the haziest, laziest stuff. Like, I’m sorry, “a country of geniuses in data center?” “We’re going to solve all of physics?” “Intelligence will be on tap, and then we’ll meter it like electricity?” The money has gotten so out of hand that these fellas aren’t even trying very hard anymore.
It would be nice if someone, anyone, could ask the AI barons this one simple question: If “intelligence” is about to become abundant, then what will the new scarcity be?” How will we organize ourselves in response to that scarcity? Who will profit from it, and who will be made more vulnerable as a result?
I can’t tell you what the world will look like in 2036. But I am damn certain that, with these guys in charge, it won’t be a utopia defined by limitless abundance. Of course it won’t. Let’s not be suckers, alright?
One final thought… zoom out far enough, and the history of the digital future looks something like this:
First, Silicon Valley built hardware that got smaller and faster and cheaper and better.
Then, Silicon Valley built software that became the mediating layer of the global economy.
And then, the finance industry ate the software industry. Every tech company today is a finance company.
Software ate the world, and then finance ate software, and now here we are.
It isn’t quite as simple as “after the Great Financial Crisis, all the finance guys moved to Silicon Valley so they could keep doing the same bullshit without all the regulatory scrutiny.” But that’s a close-enough approximation of recent history.
You cannot explain the actions of Silicon Valley today without paying attention to how the ludicrous excesses of financialization define the strategic behavior of the whole damn industry.