Future

How We Traded Democratic Rules for Corporate Permissions Regulation is the landscape, not the weather. Whether you’re building an app, writing a newsletter, selling crafts online, or just trying to share your work with the world, you will encounter rules that shape what’s possible. If democratic institutions don’t write them, the market’s largest players will. The question isn’t whether we’ll have rules—it’s who writes them, and whether they serve the many or the few. ...

Every major technological shift creates two types of people: those who cling to the old ways and get swept aside, and those who recognize the change early and position themselves to ride the wave. We’re at one of those inflection points now. We’ve built an entire economic system around the illusion of complexity. Universities churn out specialists, corporations create elaborate hierarchies of expertise, and we’ve convinced ourselves that professional work requires years of training and irreplaceable human insight. But what if most of what we call “skilled labor” is just systematized thinking that can be reduced to well-crafted prompts? ...