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January 13, 2025
The Hardware and Software of AI
Friends, it is great to talk with you again. I hope you had a restful break. In the two weeks since we last chatted, I spent some time organizing my work and thinking about what I want to accomplish in the next year to eighteen months. One big thing I am going to do is…
January 9, 2025
Meta’s Content Moderation Turnabout
Today, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced that it would immediately stop using “fact checkers” to police the content on its platforms, which also include Instagram and Threads. Meta explained: “In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content….
December 23, 2024
DOGE Needs to Dig Deeper Than Its Leaders Understand
An undergraduate class on Congress and legislation was one of the lowlights of my academic career. In my work for the class, I would often get wrapped up in critiquing legislation from the angle of bureaucratic implementation, when the professor was very clearly testing for understanding of the material about Congress. I resisted the class…
December 16, 2024
A Venture Capitalist as AI and Crypto Czar
When I first conceived this newsletter, one of the audiences I had in mind was what I called the “All-In crowd,” the people who listen to and engage with the All-In Podcast. For those who don’t listen to All-In, it’s a weekly conversation among four veteran venture capitalists: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. They…
December 9, 2024
The DOJ’s Antitrust Remedies Aren’t Keeping Pace With the Market
There’s an image that haunts me, in a good way, because it visualizes a tendency that I want to avoid. It comes from a group of researchers at the University of South Australia that asked 1,036 people in the United States how they felt about music from across various decades. The people varied in age from 18…
November 18, 2024
Taking a Swing at the Size and Cost of Government
When people talk about Illinois politics, they often reference Chicago. But when Chicagoans talk about politics, they talk about Springfield, the state capital where I was born and raised. Quite literally, I grew up in the shadow of politics. As a kid, I’d often bike to the statehouse just to relax beneath the statue of Lincoln. …
November 11, 2024
The Case for Forward-Looking Policies
This is the fourth presidential election cycle that I’ve worked as a tech policy analyst and it’s easily been my least busy. Normally, a presidential candidate would suggest a crazy idea and I’d dash off an op-ed explaining why it could be helpful or why it would violate the Constitution. And when the candidates released…
November 4, 2024
Twenty-Four Ways to Understand 2024
Economist Deirdre McCloskey opens The Narrative of Economic Expertise with an observation that blew me away when I read it as an undergraduate: It is pretty clear that an economist, like a poet, uses metaphors. They are called ‘models.’ The market for apartments in New York, says the economist, is ‘just like’ a curve on a blackboard….
October 28, 2024
How Tech Regulatory Approaches Have Changed, and Not for the Better
As president, Bill Clinton had failures, both personal and professional, but one thing he got right during his time in office was the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce. Released in July 1997, the framework served as both a statement and guidance for internet policy in those early days of the technology. Back then, the tone was…
October 24, 2024
Progress and Its Enemies
26 years ago, Virginia Postrel published The Future and Its Enemies, which I still consider one of the most insightful books of our time. The book’s subtitle, The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, has become even more relevant since 1998. Virginia gave a presentation on the ideas in her book at the Progress Conference in Berkeley last…