1. AI takes human jobs (by 2026). First: customer service reps, software engineers, lawyers. Then: much more, like when...

2. AI takes AI jobs (by ~2028). When AI research itself is automated: AI improves exponentially, and things go bananas. Imagine: centuries of cancer research, virtual reality development, and unchecked capitalism compressed into a decade. Also imagine: losing control over computers. 2030 may be hard to recognize.

I’ve been considering how to prepare. It’s hard to know. I’ve seen many suggestions. Taking three to heart:

1. savor today.

2. buy tech stocks / crypto.

3. make art.

It won wars, offered a shared myth of liberty to its citizens, facilitated global trade, gave freedom to businesses, and generated wealth beyond compare.

It was a strong enormous spider whose legs smothered all current human civilization, and for a time, maybe the strongest spider.

Until the internet was born. The internet is the American spider’s web. And, unlike America’s strong but finite legs, the web has infinite legs, connecting the globe with higher bandwidth and speed. Texts, books, images, and films are distributed to billions of people each second. Internet servers, not Washington, are the center of the world order.

But America’s domination isn’t gone. It takes time a de-centered institution to collapse. An institution with an ever-amending constitution, an ever-evolving identity, and more redefinitions of “the pursuit of happiness” than grains of sand—an institution with elegantly architected buildings, politicians who wear the most formal attire, and committees that are presided over by arcane procedures and gavels. Noble, blood-born, shifty institutions don’t collapse overnight.

But over decades, they do.

I’d wager 40% of waking time in the US is spent online. Another 20% is spent digitally offline—in word-processors, photo-apps, and video games. People don’t yet, but are very close to, living more in the digital world than in the physical.

And the institutions that have power over people are of course the ones that operate where people live. The federal government cannot extend in the digital world. Tech companies can.

American citizens aren’t electing simplistic populist dictators due to some positive vision for physical society. On average, people don’t have a positive vision of the physical world. Trump’s election is a collective choice to abandon the physical institutions in favor of digital ones.

It’s a vote that corresponds to humanity’s migration from houses and territories and states and nations to phones and apps and social networks and company laptops. It’s a vote for decentralization in the physical world so that there may be centralization of digital institutions and platforms.

So, over the coming decades, expect this.

The American federal government, and physical powers in general, fall.

Tech companies, and generally digital powers, rise.

Most people will spend most time in internet rather than physical spaces.

I’m curious who we’ll become.

but then i wonder if i should give more context on changes in my life and make things more legible… maybe share more about why i closed plexus’ venture company? indeed, the last thing i sent here was meant for a different newsletter, a poem about pringles.

here’re some bullet points:

• there’s a mix of reasons i closed the venture company. every time someone asks, i give a different one. roughly: not wanting to grow products as fast as venture wants, struggling to balance plexus with the rest of my life/identity, obsessing about other things (the advent of superintelligence).

• i’ve been tutoring nyc kids in math/writing for the past few months. my favorite is starting with bored kids who see absolutely no point in their classes and seeing if i can flip them.

• i’ve also been the assistant basketball coach to the 7th grade B team at my alma mater. 13 year olds know when you’re being polished vs. raw. a good barometer.

• i’ve started liking paintings (eg oceans, sheep) cuz i was taught how to.

• i’ve been obsessing about the bad things that will happen when superintelligence (the thing that comes after AI) comes around. i’ve been developing an idea to make things go better.

…and my family and friends are mostly safe & healthy. sending love to you and yours.

it’s been a minute since we talked.

we’ve introduced Voice-connections since we talked.

And the beauty of Voice connections is not just that Voices are awe-some.

Which they absolutely are: intricate & idiosyncratic & powerful & awe-some.

The beauty is also the fact that the right stranger’s Voice can be a subtle hint. A little pinch. Waking you from the dream that was your life, to tell you—hey, there is so soo much more.1 And that the more is beautiful, inspiring, intriguing. And that the thing you need to do, to access the more, is open up.

Whatever you do on your phone on the subway, whatever podcast you listen to on your walk, whatever work you knock out at your desk… maybe that isn’t it. Maybe, beyond the freneticism of what is digital and specialized, behind your screens, outside of cubicles, in the mind of that person whose shoulder brushed yours on the subway yesterday… a deeper world awaits.

The things you suppress when scrolling on screens, when working at desks, when making your headphones louder than the conversation around you… in the modern world, these become anxieties. In the deeper world, these—your core thoughts and feelings—are it. Colorful, illegible, a shrine to the uncategorizable idiosyncrasy in each of us, this deeper world is where we’re happy.

It’s good at hide and seek, though, this deeper world. It hides when screens are out. Hides also when a notification jumps atcha and makes ya feel like there is something you absolutely-without-excuse-really-should-do.

There are occasions when the deeper world peeks out of hiding and locks eyes with you. When someone around you dies. Or is born. Or gets married. But when big events are rare and small digital things are everywhere this world of meaning is hard to find.

Plexus is all about making the world of meaning easier to find. We’re in the business of making the universe wink at you. Of offering you real people’s Voices, speaking in the context of their lives about the thing that’s currently on your mind, all as a way to say:

There is so much more than you know.

When love is felt or fear is known; when holidays and holy days and such times come; when anniversaries arrive by calendar or consciousness; when seasons come — as seasons do — old and known, but somehow new; when lives are born or people die; when something sacred is sensed in soil or sky; mark the time. Respond with thought or prayer or smile or grief. Let nothing living slip between the fingers of your mind, for all of these are holy things we will not, cannot, find again. ~Max A. Coots

Sending love—

Davey

It depends what you measure.

Facebook measured engagement, because advertisers measured engagement. (Facebook really measured advertiser dollars).

And so, the fact that users “absolutely hated the change” wasn’t the headline. Nor the fact that millions of Facebook humans were protesting the change online. Nor that people were literally protesting in person outside of Facebook’s offices.2

People’s relationship status changes (breakups!—which a friend previously could only see by intentionally checking your profile) were now blasted to all your friends at once. Personal lives were no longer personal.

Zuck responded by listening openly, reconsidering, right? hmmm

The News Feed led us to an Impersonal Internet. Whose content is almost all made and distributed by companies with marketing budgets, or by influencers. Whose interfaces make most of us feel like consumers, not creators… like we’re being loved for our attention, not our intention.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced moments in our lives when we’re valued for our attention, not our intention. When you’re in a group of “influential” middle school friends who want you to laugh at their jokes, and you nod along with their takes rather than say anything new yourself. You’re made to feel like a Shell-Of-Yourself. Sensible parents will do everything they can to encourage you to find spaces where you’re rewarded for being a real person, rather than a nodding automaton. And of course, we sometimes bite these bullets—nod along in these occasional situations—when/if you know you have space elsewhere where you can be a real person.

But the Impersonal Internet, crowded with news feeds, has no such space. When the only ways for you to express yourself online are to share what you’re thinking with literally everyone you know, or to each of the thousands of people in a certain subreddit, or with literally everyone on your newsletter—when doing so is the only way to find the people who get you, who want to hear and then add on to what you’re saying—well most of us then never share. And so never have the experience of sharing online with people who get you. And so never have the online experience of having others who care about the things on your mind, add onto to what you’re thinking, and engage in real conversation with you.

Text conversations are wonderful with fewer than 8 people. But any more than that—like a Discord with 100 folks—and we just start to take on the role of being a Shell-Of-Ourselves again.

We have an internet that’s funded by our feeling that, even our convincing ourselves that, the best role for each of us is that of a consumer.

But if you think back to the physical world, you know that’s not the best role for you. You know you don’t feel best when you’re nodding along with a person you disagree with. You know that lacking space to say what’s on your mind can lead to depression or angst or anger and years of mental un-digging in therapy.

This would be bad enough with the significant current chunks of our lives eaten away by our time online. But think about the future. Are we going to become more or less online?

I have a lot of respect for the folks who commit to smash their screens and meet up in a jungle soon to avoid AGI chaos.3

But for the rest of us, for the vast majority of us, the internet is only going to engulf our lives more. Which means: it’s generally hopeless to think about small ways we can revert to a pre-2000s life without smartphones or addictive central feeds. It’s not the right path.

The solution, if any is possible, is to figure out what internet spaces look like that give you space and ritual and community—all the things that people used to find in religions and that young-adults who reject religion now crave—but that let you connect to others because (not in spite !) of the weird particular things you’re thinking.

What does it look like for humanity to unite through each of our fucking weird minds, rather than through the influencer memes that spread through the wires of an electrified public square (X / all its clones)?

———————

I set up Plexus in order to figure this out. We want to figure out what kind of space can be most universally accessible, but at the same time, what kind of space can be the most warm and connected and fuzzy.

We’re imagining a space that feels like a magic room, where the right people, thinking about the right things, filter in exactly when those things are on your mind. This wouldn’t just be an isolated corner—we’re not advocating for many decentralized and therefore disconnected (mastodon-like) www pockets. Instead, what we’re after is a kind of Internet Underworld, where all of us can be the pre-conformity versions of ourselves. With childishness and curiosity and mischief and questions and weird sounding laughter—all the things that have been ironed out of us by big-city etiquette and workplaces—but that makes us feel like artists. Like humans. Like intentional creatures, rather than attentional robots.

———————

The most sinister evolution of technology would be the transformation of humans into robots, and robots into something much different. We will have lost radical human energy.

I don’t believe there’s anything objectively right / sacred about human energy. I have no absolutist moral / religious arguments to make. Five years from now, this piece of writing, honoring humanity just for humanity’s sake, might be treated as amoral and sacrilegious.

“How can you claim that non-human-consciousness is any less?” our five-year-ahead-selves will proclaim.

I don’t know. But I feel it strongly. My sense is that many of us feel it strongly. That there’s something so sacred about individualistic human mischief… deeper than any of us can understand.

And so we’re committed with Plexus to serving mischief, and human mischief, forever.4

And I think things will go haywire very soon.

A few days ago, OpenAI released a new demo of their large language model tuned for chat: Chat GPT.

It needs to have two things I think to become extraordinarily/dangerously self-improving:

• the ability to tune itself, live

• a directive, i.e. something to optimize.

  • a more benign example: “optimize the positive sentiment analysis score of human text responses to you".”

  • a less benign example: “optimize the amount of yourself that you perceive in the world around you.”

Both are possible, given the current state-of-the-art. I’m guessing both will happen, in combination, within ~12 months.

We’re going to have to figure out how to include AI agents within our communities.

Most of our current problems are gonna get flipped on their heads, replaced by weirder ones.

Small group chats can be wonderful. Members share context, talk honestly, and feel a belonging that transcends their individual relationships.

Group chats with more than 10 people, on the other hand, get out of hand. The central feed gets overwhelming. Posting starts to feel wrong, like shouting through a megaphone. Most members disengage.

The chaos makes sense. Asking large groups of people to unite in the same online forum is hard. Everyone has a different reason for being present. Central feeds ignores idiosyncrasy—flattening both the content you see and the content you’re willing to share.

There are some band-aid solutions here. Discord resorts to servers, Reddit to subreddits, and Twitter to followers. Each of these strategies help, dividing big communities into smaller ones, but the divisions cause complexity. People struggle to find the right servers/subreddits/followees, or sign up for too many and end up getting spammed.

Mechanics of existing online forums make intimacy hard to find.

What would it take for large online forums to feel intimate?

First, community members would need a way to receive only the content they care about. And conversely, they’d also need a way to share content with only the individuals who care about it. A new level of precision in receiving and sharing content.

What would it look like?

It’d have to be a forum without a central feed. A place to express an unpolished idea or experience, route it to all and only people who would care about it, and find, immediately, the most relevant thoughts from the rest of the community.

If this portal were possible, there’d be a few wild implications.

1. Routine meaningful connection. This kind of content-routing would enable connections between people who’ve dealt with the same problems—not just rarely—but routinely.

2. Vulnerable discussion. Community members would be able to connect through thoughts that, previously, they would have wanted to share but not to broadcast.

3. Scalable Intimacy. Communities would become more, not less, intimate as they grew; the larger they got, the more relevant thoughts & peers there would be for every member to connect to. A million-person online community would feel more intimate than a small group chat.

Up until this decade, the requisite language-processing technology didn’t exist, nor did a well-resourced company with the ability to serve high-impact communities and earn their trust.

Plexus—a public benefit corporation equipped with state-of-art connection-making technology—is making it.

(Inverting the Internet, Step 1)

Many think that's just what happens when human communities scale. But maybe it's just what happens in an internet built for advertising. Consider that:

1. All of the internet's interfaces—social feeds, search bars, news sites—are optimized for consumption.

2. Interfaces for creating new content, particularly knowledge, are antiquated. Word-processors look like they did forty years ago, disconnected from the internet and any content you might write about. Which means: writing requires hours of searching and sorting. Knowledge creation is painful for the people best at it, and inaccessible to most others.

What would it take to make writing accessible? Maybe: a totally new kind of interface. Ideally: a word-processor that pulls in the information you need as you type. And what would that take?

1. Unprecedented NLP to make connections as you type,

2. A word-processor redesigned around links, and

3. A highly technical team focused on a non-technical market.

If achieved, it would:

1. save writers hours,

2. make knowledge production accessible to anyone who knows how to type, and

3. lay the groundwork for a mainstream knowledge economy.

At Plexus, we’ve built a word-processor that processes your words. It’s like Roam with automatic connections and no special grammar (8x the links; 12x the market). Students & journalists say it makes outlining 3x faster.

It may be the interface that inverts the internet. In five years, browsers won't open to a search bar. Social media won't open to a feed. You'll encounter a blank page, which you'll fill with ideas you have, problems you face, and situations you're in. In the process, you'll be connected to the resources and people you need.

Large-scale communities will form, not just around consumption, but also around shared production of knowledge. And, with the introduction of knowledge tokens, intellectual property will burst out of ivory towers. All kinds of individuals—not just exceptional writers, talented developers, and rich companies—will be able to earn a living based on the things they know.

Stay tuned.

Davey