Barking at the moon

The Rebooting’s recent research report, done in collaboration with Beehiiv, examines the strategic role email is playing as publishing infrastructure rather than as another publishing channel. Some key finding:

1. Email has become core audience infrastructure. 84% of respondents say email is mission-critical or very important to their audience strategy.

2. Newsletter audiences continue to grow – driven by owned channels. 81% say direct signups on owned properties are their primary growth driver.

3. Engagement is the metric publishers care about most. 80% say engagement metrics like opens and clicks are the primary measure of success.

4. Monetization is expanding but still evolving. Advertising leads current revenue models, while subscriptions, events, and product revenue are gaining momentum.

5. Operational limitations are slowing progress. More than half of respondents cite staffing and resource constraints as the biggest barriers to expanding email programs.

Get the full report

"There’s. two kinds of dumb: the guy that gets naked and runs out in the snow and barks at the moon, and the guy who does the same thing in my living room. First one don't matter, the second one you're kinda forced to deal with." – George Walker, interim head coach, Hickory Huskers.

Silicon Valley is in the find out phase. Its grand project of remaking the world through  artificial intelligence is markedly unpopular. 

Lots of Silicon Valley know-it-alls blame this on marketing or PR. And there is an element of that. I don’t think Steve Jobs would do product marketing around massive job displacement and possibly the end of humanity. Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO and doomer-in-chief, warned for approximately the 1500th time that AI could cause 20% unemployment in five years. His rival, Sam Altman, is transparently untrustworthy and regularly says oddball things like comparing AI energy consumption as preferable to the resources expended to raise babies, who are rarely productive. 

It was striking to me that a CNN clip of a Kentucky farmer who refused to sell her land for a datacenter at an inflated $26 million resonated so much. The plainspoken family – I was looking for subtitles for that Kentucky accent –are modern-day heroes for telling Big Tech to take their money and stuff it. Family matriarch Ida Huddleston narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips when asked the question about the jobs the data center would supposedly bring. My experience with women of this age is that when you get that look, you’re going to get unvarnished truth. "I say they're a liar, and the truth isn't in them,” she said. “It’s a scam.”

Contrast that to Melania Trump gamely reading off a sheet she probably saw for the first time about a humanoid robot named Plato teaching children. Hardly an inspiring message, not to mention a very odd messenger. I see lost delivery robots regularly on the streets, so I’m skeptical Plato will replace teachers anytime soon. Also, in the spirit of first principles: Do we want this? I can’t shake, and I think others feel the same, that this is being shoved down our throats.  

Leave aside the hobbyists hacking together OpenClaw with their Mac Minis, regular people don’t see the benefits of AI that are worth all the downsides. It was telling that Open AI decided to shift its focus to B2B and shut down its AI video generation tool Sora, just three months after announcing a $1 billion deal with Disney. Media companies being left in the lurch by Big Tech truly never gets old. This is the Charlie Brown trying to kick the football scene on a loop. 

The enterprise shift is happening as Big Tech is facing pressure from its past actions. Tech moves too fast for accountability, so it usually arrives a day late and a dime short. The social media era had its bright spots but is now seen as a bit of a disaster, particularly for kids. Meta and Google’s YouTube were found liable for addictive features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendation systems focused on driving engagement. The amount awarded is trivial; the precedent isn’t. It means something that the methods used by the plaintiffs were borrowed by the fight to hold Big Tobacco accountable.

Already, AI slop has become a common term for the output of these AI tools. So of course, the new front is AI agents that will accomplish tasks in the real world, in theory. The Wall Street Journal wrote about a tech investor who has spent $100,000 a year on AI “to create charts, blog posts and presentations.” Another example is parents creating dashboards to keep track of their children’s activities. 

There’s a type of person who finds this prospect thrilling. They’re about 10% of humanity in my guesstimate. The bet that people who scroll TikTok for funny videos for hours suddenly want to create their own software is a tough one. 

That’s why the chilly reception AI has gotten in the real world beyond OpenClaw meetups is beyond a messaging problem. There is a contradiction at the heart of this entire project. I listen to Amodei more closely than Altman because he presents as a wizard, and I respect wizards more than marketers and Deal Guys. I’ve noticed that he struggles to answer affirmatively whether AI will further human autonomy and freedom. 

That’s because it’s unlikely that these technologies will serve that. Silicon Valley is a long way from the 1984 Apple ad. Its “discovery” will not serve the “misfits” but the already powerful. It will entrench power, not challenge it. Meta has ditched its bonkers-from-the-start metaverse fever dreams – it did get a pretty good corporate moniker out of it – and instead is banking on AI to be a $9 trillion valuation in five years. Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI bot version of himself to help run the company. 

The productivity goons can’t get enough of AI. It’s the latest growth hack. Anytime I open X, I’m told some field is “cooked” because AI can now make PowerPoints or apply to 50 jobs in 30 seconds. The promise is this will eliminate busy work. Sounds great in theory. The reality is rote work is easier than deep work. 

And the focus on the enterprise gives away the game. This is another tool that will be used to squeeze more from workers at best and to replace them with software when possible. At least that’s how it will be applied. There’s no 20-hour work week coming. I’ve gotten far enough in my Capitalism history to know that with a high degree of confidence. 

I don’t think it will work, at least in the short term. There’s a divide between the economic forecasts of massive upheaval by AImaxxer tech people and economists. The AI maxxers look at the capability curve and believe that is what matters. Economists look at the diffusion curve. Silicon Valley tends to be tech determinists. It’s just a personality type. But in the real world, diffusion is a complex process where this kind of technology is absorbed in a vast and complicated economy and society.

I’m not new to overheated claims. These all pale in comparison to what I took as lunacy during the twilight of the dot-com bubble. Most of the ideas of that era did eventually come to pass, on a timeline far longer than what its breathless and self-interested promoters claimed. 

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