2026-06-23 08:00:00
One aspect of strategy that’s been largely lost in the tech industry in recent years is how to compete against platforms, since the major tech companies have gotten so big that markets are no longer competitive. However, the AI market is still early enough, and users and society are still angry enough, that the Big AI companies can lose.
But for them to lose, everybody else in the ecosystem has to carry out the nearly-lost art of platform strategy. Tech companies (and even open source communities!) used to carry out these tactics in emerging product categories ranging from desktop office suites to operating systems to web browsers, though over the decades, the lesson that big tech learned was, basically, that they should play dirty.
You win platform strategy battles through power and persuasion. We're going to get both.
Historically, we would have relied on regulators or media to help hold bad actors in the tech space accountable, but in the United States, these entities are largely not going to help very much. Some state and local governments may assist, and some independent journalists or smaller media outlets are pushing for accountability, but the most powerful entities are either captured or complicit in many cases, so we don’t have the institutional pushback that had sometimes been present in earlier points of technological change.
The thing that matters right now is that we understand that all of the Big AI companies are extremely vulnerable. The reason they’re making so much noise, and spending so much money, is because they know that they’re vulnerable. Users, and especially users who are developers have an enormous amount of leverage to control where AI goes. And if those communities of users can coordinate, they can put power back into the hands of the people. Today, that means focusing on some technical interventions, along with the cultural and political pushback that’s happening. That’s how we begin to reduce, or even prevent, some of the worst AI harms in the future.
Here are some of the proven tactics that have helped shift the balance of power in prior tech reckonings:
The first and most important technical goal is for everyone to push for all AI usage to be disintermediated — where users access their AI apps or services through open tools or interfaces that aren’t controlled by the Big AI companies. These tools, in the form of “harnesses”, or through text editors or command lines, or just through the familiar chat interfaces that lots of people use, need to move as quickly as possible to being controlled by community-built, open options. The sooner this step happens, the sooner we unlock the ability to shift decision-making power out of the hands of the corporate platforms, and begin to undermine their ability to cement lock-in of users.
Status: Good. There are a number of popular, mature tools in almost every category for users who want to access today’s AI tools through a free, open interface. Most of the work now is to get the word out about these tools, and to continue to polish and improve the user experience so that they offer features and design touches that the commercial tools can’t or won’t.
Another key capability that the open ecosystem must provide is the ability to seamlessly switch between different AI providers on the fly, to reduce costs, to provide better performance, or to get both benefits. In many cases, this will be seamless and automatic, just making the right choice for users so that they get the best option all of the time, but advanced users will want to tweak their settings, like when businesses may want to be very aggressive in minimizing the amount of money that their employees are allowed to spend on AI services.
The important part here is that this forces AI platforms that want to compete to remain compatible with all of their competitors, keeping the market dynamic, and ensuring that all of the big providers are easily replaced with another vendor at any time. Basically, we always have to be able to keep them in their place, and they should know that they could go away at any time. Most companies are aware of these needs, but the more regular consumers are familiar with these kinds of requirements, the more pressure there will be on companies to conform with standards. (This is also what will enable the disintermediation mentioned in point 1.)
Status: Good. This is happening already in business environments, where companies demand this kind of flexibility. Developers have been creating very dynamic systems for switching between AI providers, and the ecosystem encourages this kind of switching by extensively comparing different AI platforms against each other whenever new models are released. The important thing to maintain here is the narrative that none of the individual models matter more than the overall ecosystem — and that even the biggest companies have to conform to the same strict formats and standards as the independent AI systems created by communities around the world.
Another vital concern for shifting power away from the Big AI companies is undermining them economically. Instead of simply following the classic “commoditize the complement” strategy that commercial companies often execute, open source projects created by a community can more straightforwardly pursue a path of enlightened value destruction. Non-commercial LLMs have been roughly keeping pace with the Big AI platforms, following the pattern I described as “frontier minus six”, where free and open models lag about 6 months behind the most cutting-edge AI labs — which means they’re still pretty freaking great for most uses.
In a scenario where there are extremely capable models that cost nothing except for the price of keeping a few servers running, as well as very robust tools that make it effortless to seamlessly switch between models (see point #2!), more and more organizations will shift more and more work away from the Big AI companies, especially as those companies keep raising their prices.
But there’s no reason that these same principles can’t be followed by ordinary consumers as well. Many developers are already using these techniques to switch to free models to save money, and the only barrier to this practice becoming more widespread is that the user experience is still too clunky and technical for most regular people.
Status: Okay. Lots of people are working on this, and in some scenarios, the free AI tools are even pretty great. But for the most part, there are still too many compromises in either the end results or the user experience for this to be a mainstream alternative today. This can change, with the right investments and focus on improving things — and focusing on differentiation in areas where the open community can distinguish itself from all of the Big AI companies.
Pretty much everybody who’s from the 21st century, or anybody who’s a creative person, is pretty furious about AI. Anyone who’s not oblivious to culture is aware of that. Yet all of the Big AI companies keep treating it like some fad that’s going to blow over, or a trend that they can just steamroll with their dollars. This isn’t going to go the way they want.
However, the people who will build the alternatives can actually listen to the values and criticisms of the people who are angry, and make tools that respect and respond to what they’re saying. An Internet of consent is not only possible, it’s all around us, if we choose to respect it. If people hear that they can get some of the conveniences or features that they were previously told were only possible with extractive, exploitative, evil AI tools, but without any of those negatives, they’ll actually be pretty happy to hear it.
Today, usage of AI is high enough that even some of the people who hate AI are using it. Some of this is due to the coercive way that AI is being shoved into everybody’s faces, some of it is due to there being some places that people feel it has utility that they wish they could access without its moral compromises. When people are compelled to use platforms that they object to (as a lot of people feel about using things like social media), the feelings of guilt and resentment that come along with it are deeply toxic.
What we're talking about across these first three points, if taken together, is an entirely new experience for millions of users. And that new set of platforms could respect the consumer backlash against AI and channel it into presenting tools that acknowledge their anger and treat it as legitimate. They might even be tools for fighting back.
Status: This one’s going to be tough. This is the one idea where most people think I’m crazy. People who have a righteous anger about the harms of current Big AI companies say that there couldn’t be any such thing as “good AI”, and I understand their skepticism. People who think AI is an interesting technology but hate the hype (the majority AI view) are usually skeptical that the open community could make offerings that are good enough to compete against the big commercial offerings. And AI enthusiasts are pretty skeptical that AI critics would ever come around to seeing any technology in this category as being acceptable, no matter how thoughtfully it was created or presented.
I think there’s enough anger at the trillionaire predators to go around, though.
It’s been a long time since we succeeded in wresting control of a nascent space away from the tycoons trying to take it over. But it’s pretty clear what the stakes are this time, and it’s also clear that the window for changing the path of the AI world is closing pretty rapidly.
Obviously, this kind of shift won’t be easy, but I think people would be pretty surprised how possible it is. There’s a snowball effect that happens once folks start to understand that there are appealing alternatives to the things that are making them miserable. An entire generation needs to discover that enshittification is not only not inevitable, it is downright preventable, and the power to do so rests in our hands.
If you’re a developer, you have an extra responsibility: are you vetting your work against this list? If nothing else, you need to be doing so just to ensure that you have a chance of having a career over time. But it’s also the right thing to do.
And if you’re not technical in that way, you don’t have to become a developer, but you can familiarize yourself with these concerns broadly — even if you hate AI and never want to touch the stuff! — so that you know what argument to make about how to shift the balance of power.
The most important thing to know is that, as so many people have said, none of this is inevitable. But the way we fight that inevitability is with a more exciting, human, powerful alternative, not merely by repeating what we’re saying no to. We are not simply angrily running away from something, we can all be joyfully running toward something together.
In the early days of tech blogging, one of the biggest reasons that so many people got used to reading Joel Spolsky’s blog was that he’d often write amusing little fables that shared key lessons about product strategy. Strategy Letter V (on commoditizing your complements), or How Microsoft Lost the API War, or Fire and Motion, or… Platforms. If you can squint past the turn-of-the-century mentions of Microsoft Excel, there are lots of interesting lessons there.
2026-06-15 08:00:00
“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.”
That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.
We’re in another one of those big inflection points for AI. Trump administration policymakers for AI suspended access to Anthropic’s newest product. All of these policymakers have a web of investments in competing players — including SpaceX, which is about to IPO — and the corruption and grift of this cohort are so extensive that it’s impossible to judge what the actual risks and reality are around any of these platforms or technologies, since no one involved is an honest broker.
More broadly, there’s been the widespread pushback against AI culturally, one that is undeniably strongest amongst those who were born in this century. But the adoption patterns and usage data show that even younger people are using some AI tools. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen before, with social media. We have a significant group of people knowing that a technology contradicts some of their values, preferences, or beliefs, but using it anyway.
Sometimes it’s due to the coercive nature of the platforms themselves, and how they insinuate themselves into our lives, to the point where we don’t even realize we’re using them. Sometimes they are forced upon us by the creators of the platforms, since they have so much power over the devices we use, and the tools that we rely on for things like doing our jobs, or communicating with our loved ones or our communities.
There are millions of people who don’t like that they’re using LLMs provided by the Big AI companies, but end up using them anyway. Just like there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t like that they’re on the giant social networking platforms like Facebook, but end up using them anyway. The feelings that people walk away from those experiences with are often guilt, or shame, or embarrassment, or resentment — all some of the most negative and destructive emotions that humans can experience.
But if people want to get the benefits of some of these technologies, without either the shame of supporting the harms of Big AI, or the unpredictability of being beholden to corrupt billionaires bickering with one another, there are finally starting to be other options. As I mentioned in (One) Good AI Is Here, it’s possible for creators working in their own communities to now make AI tools that serve their specific needs, without causing all the harms that make people object to Big AI.
This feels like the true alternative to the narrative of “inevitability” that so much of the hyper-funded AI industry is trying to push, while also not forcing people into a quiet life of AI guilt if they still find some utility in some aspects of these tools.
Right now, those who (rightly!) object to Big AI due to their platforms’ impact on the environment, or labor, or their extractive use of content without consent, or its many other potential harms, are generally not aware of, or often open to, the idea of there being small, human-scale tools created by and for communities that are accountable for those tools over time. But my suspicion is that it is not only possible to make these tools, there may in fact already be many of these tools in existence, and we’re just not as familiar with them because they’ve been quietly serving their specific niches without having multi-billion-dollar campaigns promoting them.
What I'm unabashedly hoping to do (and I think the Guardian story reflects some momentum in that regard), is shift the narrative from focusing on running away from the bad thing in AI, to finding the good thing that we're running toward. There are alternatives that we could be affirmatively choosing, ones that look at questions like the one I asked more than a year ago, "What Would "Good" AI Look Like?", and offer answers that might give us hope instead of just the righteous rage and anger we feel when we let our imaginations be constrained by the limits of what Big AI offers.
2026-04-30 08:00:00
If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?
Here’s the TL;DR:
First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.
Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)
With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.
Flickr wasn't a social platform first — it was a photography platform first. That means it was designed to store high-resolution versions of every image, and didn't distort pictures with things like filters. Every image showed details like what kind of camera had taken the photo, and even what specific settings were used to take the shot. People started building communities around the then-new idea of using tags to help them find content by topics online — an idea that would directly influence the creation of hashtags on Twitter a few years later.
Another core idea of the time was a firm belief in open data: people should own and control their own work. Eventually, some experts (including a then-teenage Aaron Swartz, who we'd later talk about in the early days of Markdown) created a set of standards called Creative Commons licenses, now maintained by an organization of the same name. Flickr made it easy for users to describe what permissions people had for reusing or remixing any photos they posted. (I was helping out with a blogging platform back then, and I think we were the first tool to support this stuff. It felt like a big deal at the time!)
People's Flickr images started popping up in corporate PowerPoint presentations or commercial advertising almost immediately. A little sidebar: the incredibly positive and generous intent of these open licenses has since been exploited by extractive Big AI companies, who ransacked all of the images on Flickr that had permissive licenses without any consent from, or compensation to, the creators. That might be legal by most readings of the licenses, but if you have hundreds of billions of dollars and don't think you should at least have a conversation with the photographers whose work you're using, you're probably an asshole.
Our close-knit community of people building the new era of web apps was keenly aware that our users were creating culture. This realization brought a huge amount of responsibility — not just in enabling users to express themselves, but in thinking about the long term for people's ownership of their works. Public institutions had just begun to use these platforms, which meant that the content being shared wasn't just a nice picture to look at: it might be socially or even historically significant.
What happened in the years that followed was… a lot of corporate machinations. Flickr got bought by Yahoo. Flickr's founders left Yahoo. Yahoo got bought by Verizon. You can imagine how all of that went; the details aren't all that important, except to say that by the time Instagram launched, Flickr had begun to fade into obscurity. People were focused on mobile phones instead of the desktop, on sharing square images with filters instead of full-resolution photography, and on connecting socially instead of caring about photos as art or a cultural record. Nobody would post the canonical historical photo of an event with a Valencia filter on it. Most of Flickr's users moved on, rarely checking their old accounts — until a family-owned photo service named SmugMug bought the service from Yahoo. A human-scale operation with some actual heart and a love of photography was a much better home for the platform than some random division of Verizon.
In 2022, the new team at SmugMug that owned Flickr decided to focus on Flickr’s larger place in culture. Many major institutions around the world had chosen to archive their public photos on Flickr because of its superior support for high-resolution imagery, its unique ability to declare explicit legal licenses (including public domain licenses), and its long-term reputation for reliably hosting content without any of the harms or abuses that typical social networks had inflicted on users. Museums around the world had entire catalogs on the platform, and governments routinely used it to document their public events. When I had a photo taken at an official White House event with President Obama, his team sent me the final image afterward by sending me a Flickr link; when Zohran Mamdani met King Charles, the NYC Mayor’s Office shared those pictures on Flickr, too.
The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world. (You should absolutely donate to support the Flickr Foundation in their mission to preserve these vital public resources for many years in the future.)
It’s in this context that NASA has long been sharing its imagery on Flickr, for all of its missions — not just Artemis II. There’s even a special section for NASA on The Commons. And since everything is provided in incredibly high-resolution and has every single detail about the photo and how it was taken, it’s possible to combine the information about the photo with other data and create amazing resources like this beautiful timeline of the entire mission. You can see Hank Green’s wonderful narration of his inspiration and creative journey behind the timeline right here:
Anybody who’s read my site for a while knows that I’m a huge proponent of owning your own website, and having your own content live there. Shouldn’t NASA, of all institutions, have their photos live on their own nasa.gov website? Well, yes! But.
One complication is that many large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!), and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.
In contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful technologists can be very effective in maintaining content over a timescale of decades. The SmugMug team has been very thoughtful in managing both their business and their technical infrastructure in order to sustain Flickr’s public archives for years to come. (Though, as mentioned, you should still donate to ensure they can keep doing so!)
What’s more painful is the more recent threats to public stewardship of this kind of content. The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.
We’ll be glad to have archives like Flickr’s in the future, and people around the world will be glad for its place in archiving even much more mundane aspects of culture.
I was honored to get to reflect on my long history with Flickr, and with online community, in an interview with my old friend Jessamyn West, for the Flickr Foundation’s blog. In a conversation that unspooled over a few months, I think we covered so many of the themes that resonated in what I’ve mentioned here, and what struck me most was how much I wanted a new generation of people on the internet to have their own version of the communities and experiences that we got to have when sites like Flickr were first being made. People still cherish those values!
The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades. Then, others who do some of the most ambitious and astounding things imaginable can build on that work to inspire us. And then, some more regular folks can build on top of that and help us waste a little bit of time just clicking around on something fun. That’s what the internet is supposed to be about!
This isn’t just about recounting old web lore — this is about explaining the internet we have right now. Hank’s timeline site is brand new, entertaining a whole new generation, and probably the majority of the audience who are looking at it weren’t even born when Flickr was first conceived. But the reason he can build that site is because of the values and the inventiveness of the team and community who created a platform like Flickr — and because those kinds of values are durable. They might not be as loud or flashy, but they are still everywhere, quietly enabling a lot of the things we enjoy most every day.
Public dollars helped make a fascinating community, then public dollars enabled a breathtaking journey into space, and then a public commons helped a creator make a novel way to explore that journey. Lots of people chose, over and over, to be generous with their genius. These are all gifts that a bunch of strangers gave each other, over hundreds of thousands of miles, and many years. Inspiration is all around us!
2026-04-28 08:00:00
The cultural battles over AI have broken down over predictable lines in the past few years, with critics rightfully calling out the big AI platforms for training on content without consent, recklessly building without considering environmental impact, and designing platforms that are unaccountable because their code and weights (the parameters that describe how an AI model works) aren’t open for third-parties to evaluate. The AI zealots have done themselves no favors, by not only dismissing all of these valid criticisms, but by also making increasingly outlandish and extreme claims about the capabilities of the Big AI platforms, while simultaneously scaremongering about the brutal effect they’ll have on people’s lives and careers. It’s no wonder the public sentiment about AI has become so negative.
But a small cohort of us who are curious about LLMs as a technology, yet deeply critical of Big AI companies for their impact on society, have been asking what would “good” AI look like? Is it possible to make versions of these technologies that provide real benefits, and actually help people, without all of the attendant harms? We’ve had prior eras of machine learning tools that were useful technologies without being massively destructive — are the negative externalities intrinsic to LLMs in general?
We might have just gotten our first glimpse at an AI that’s actually good.
This is just one small example that I saw recently, in a very unexpected place, but I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s not a tool that every person in the world is going to use, but it feels a bit like the famous William Gibson quote, “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” This might be a little tiny bit of a good AI future, and now we just need to distribute the same kind of thing to a lot more people.
What’s good? Something that checks every box I can think of for our most immediately positive goals: it’s trained entirely with data that were consensually gathered; it’s completely open source and open weights, so anybody can examine it to know exactly how it works and what biases or flaws it might have; it’s designed to run on ordinary computers that normal people have access to — including those that can run entirely on renewable and responsible energy sources. And it is controlled by creators, not extractors, people who are inarguably on the side of artists and creatives and those who make art and culture in the world, designed to support and enable and empower their expression. No billionaires or guests of Epstein’s island were involved in the creation of this technology.
Let’s back up a little bit. Corridor Digital is a video production shop and content studio that have been popular on YouTube since the earliest days of its independent filmmaking community. They’ve stayed relevant through many changing trends and format shifts, most recently becoming wildly popular for their ongoing series of video reactions to the visual effects and stunt sequences in popular films and TV shows. Over time, the series has earned a ton of respect from many of the top practitioners in the industry from areas like VFX, stunt work, animation, and more. They even went direct to their fans with a nice subscription service, helping support their work directly.
But still, this was basically a bunch of (mostly) guys making videos. Until something interesting happened recently.
Niko Pueringer, one of the cofounders of Corridor Digital, and one of the more prominent on-screen characters in their filmed content, is not a software developer. Then, a few weeks ago, he decided he had reached a breaking point in one of the challenges that effects artists regularly have to deal with: green screen keying. (That’s the process in which an artist extracts a foreground image from the green background when they’re creating a clip that will be composited together for an effects shot.) Basically, the current tools were crude enough that it felt like an almost manual process, requiring artists to painstakingly cut out images like they were snipping out pictures from a magazine with a dull pair of scissors.
So, Niko created a set of his own videos using CGI to simulate a green screen, and began training an AI model — in this case, a neural network — to learn how to key the footage that he'd generated for this purpose. (He was able to build the tools that carried out this training by asking one of the current popular commercial AI tools to help.) After a good bit of time, trial and error, and heavy computation, the end result was a system that was extremely effective at green screen keying. He even sent an early version of the system to other professionals in the industry to compare its results to their own commercial-grade tools, and they confirmed that it often performed comparably to some of the best tools on the market.
Niko made a video explaining the project — and released the code that would enable others to run the same tool for themselves. (Do check out the clip — the team have become very gifted storytellers, and the narrative does a wonderful job of bringing you along on the journey of the highs and lows of discovering how to try to invent something new.)
Once the new tool, now called CorridorKey was out in the wild, a community rapidly formed, and instantly adopted the software into a full-fledged open source project — even though Niko had never led an open source project before. As is typical for such an enthusiast community, they were able to teach their leader about all the arcane processes involved in accepting code improvements from strangers around the world.
Within days, the community had made the tool significantly easier to use — especially for non-expert video editors who would struggle with the complexities of configuring conventional (super-nerdy) open source software. Other community members massively reduced the hardware requirements needed to perform the advanced video processing that the tool enables, moving from needing some of the most powerful workstations available to running on ordinary consumer desktop computers that many home filmmakers might have access to. And all of this for free. Many comparable tools would cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars for video editing teams to use. As Niko said in his original video, he didn’t “want to pay rent for his paintbrush”.
In the follow-up video just two weeks later, it was clear that there had been an extraordinary response to the release of CorridorKey. And an even more extraordinary next milestone was achieved, with the announcement that Niko would be releasing all of the original training data for the creation of the tool — all of the videos and content used to create the model, so that others could replicate the work, or even create their own models if they wanted to improve upon the work itself.
For the technically-minded, CorridorKey is licensed under a modified Creative Commons license, with the intention of preventing commercial exploitation without consent. I’m sure this will prompt some hand-wringing about whether it fits everyone’s definitions of “open source”, but given that someone could certainly reimplement this approach from scratch, given all of the material that Niko and his community have shared, I think that’s a distinction without a difference. The larger point here about a turning point in the AI and LLM ecosystem is what is transformative for creators who’ve been beleaguered by the AI cheerleading for the last few years.
Importantly, using CorridorKey doesn’t impose any restrictions or obligations on people making videos. There’s no phoning home, no scraping of videos to be used for training models, not even collecting an email address for marketing purposes. It’s a stark contrast to what people are used to in the commercial software world, let alone the hyper-surveillance world of most Big AI companies.
Okay, so that’s one tool. But what if you’re not a video creator who does things with green screens? How does this help anybody else? There are a few really important breakthroughs here that start to help more people realize what’s possible.
All of these traits are things that can be replicated in many more fields, by many more passionate people who don’t have to necessarily be experts, but who care about displacing the tech tycoons’ one-size-fits-all platforms with something that is human-scale and accountable.
For years, I’ve had this conviction that a better AI is possible, and I understand why many people have felt I was being naive, or that the way tech is today makes it impossible for such a thing to survive. But I think the tide is turning, and people are so fed up with the software-brained CEOs forcing things on them that they don’t want. That doesn’t mean that people hate technology! It just means that they hate what these dudes have made technology in to.
It’s nice to be reminded of what tech can be at its best. Sometimes it’s a thing that extracts exactly what we want to see from the background we’re trying to leave behind.
2026-04-20 08:00:00
It's been a decade since we lost Prince, and I wanted to take a moment to offer a look back at some of the pieces I've written over the years, and share some of the work I've done, and hopefully it will give you a chance to explore some aspect of his artistry or legacy that you haven't yet had a chance to discover!
Perhaps a good place to start: It's time to discover Prince — a set of starting points to look at Prince's musical catalog, with selected albums (with more than 40 albums to pick from, it can be overwhelming to know where to start!) and some playlists that I created specifically to help new fans find out exactly why we love his music so much.
Another comprehensive overview: Every video Prince ever made. I walked through all of the music videos Prince made over the four decades of his career, offering some info and context that might help you find which ones are most compelling (or weird!) and worth your time.
I've also gotten to guest on a number of podcasts and in other media over the years to discuss various aspects of Prince's career. Perhaps none was more exciting for me than talking about Prince's history of technological innovation for the official Prince podcast. Then, no less than the New York Times described me as a "Prince scholar" when it covered the discovery of the earliest known footage of Prince as a child. There are a bunch of other podcast appearances (see below) but these felt like the pinnacle of legitimacy for my career as a Prince fan.
Here on my site, there are some pieces I wrote to try to explain a few of Prince's masterworks. I wanted to give a sort of x-ray view into the larger cultural and even political context behind his choices when Prince created his best-known artistic expressions:
Then, there are some fun artifacts and experiences about Prince that I found to be worth sharing, and other folks have found them to be pretty fun, too. One of my most favorite stories is The Purple Raincheck, about the time that Prince invited me to his house, but I couldn't go. And yet somehow, in true Prince fashion, I ended up with an even better story in the end anyway. If you've ever wanted to know what it's like to roll up to Prince's Oscars party, this is the one for you.
At the other end of the nerdy spectrum, there's this piece about my favorite floppy disc of all time, a rarity I was able to track down which contained the obscure font that Prince's team sent out to publications when he had changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, so that they could properly render his trademark icon. Later, with the help of the brilliant minds at Adafruit, I was able to recover the data from the disc after almost three decades, through some vintage technology and a little bit of good luck.
For Minnesota Public Radio's The Current, we also dug into Prince's history as a computer nerd. On Switched on Pop, we dug into Why U Love 2 Listen 2 Prince, with an incredible audio breakdown showing how Prince influenced everybody — including a direct connection to the biggest album of all time.
We've been lucky to have a global community of Prince scholars that's formed over the years, which regularly hosts academic symposia, publishes papers and books, delivers remarkable talks on every aspect of Prince's work and the impact of his legacy, and in general uses his art as the starting point for some pretty extraordinary cultural exploration. One manifestation of that tendency to take his work seriously is the spreadsheet of Prince recordings, which is a fan-created work designed to provide a canonical reference for the thousands of compositions that Prince created over his career, unifying the conversations and discussions that people have. This is genuine nerd stuff!
And finally, one of the things I'm most proud of is this talk I delivered just a few weeks after Prince passed, in Minneapolis on what would have been his 58th birthday. It covers a really broad swath of Prince's influences and both his technical innovations and fierce battle for artistic independence. But it also dives into a lot of my background and my family's personal history, and connects it to a lot of themes of immigration and the systems that govern how this country moves. A decade on, I think some of these themes resonate more than ever, and if you're willing to set aside some time for it, I'd really love for more people to watch it, as I think it speaks to so many of the things I care most deeply about.
In all, after the initial grief and shock of his loss, I've been pleased to see Prince's legacy and impact grow. It's been wonderful to see so many people be surprised and delighted at all the different ways his work and innovative ideas remain relevant and resonant years and even decades after he created them. And I never get tired of people around the world sending me links or images of Prince or Prince-related items, saying "this reminded me of you!". Whether it's from old friends or people I've never met, it's something very special to be connected to others through the art and creativity of a fiercely independent spirit.
Above all else, Prince wanted to encourage people to create and be creative, to have mastery over their work and their lives, to be their true selves, and to be loving and compassionate towards others. Like everyone, he was flawed and complicated and weird and contradictory. But unlike anyone, he was able to create new worlds that millions of people got to live in inside their imaginations, and to fight impossible battles against all the odds and still somehow prevail.
That's still an inspiring example everyone can follow, no matter who your are, or how you create in the world. And best of all, Prince has created a perfect soundtrack to help you do it.
2026-04-16 08:00:00
It’s rare that you get to see work that directly helps those who most deserve it, but I want to tell you about the opportunity we so seldom get to actually contribute in a way that we know will have real impact.
I’ve been on the board of the Lower Eastside Girls Club for about a decade, getting a front row seat to seeing what a truly community-focused and effective organization can do for those in need when things are done the right way. This is the model of what we want our public institutions to be — laser-focused on the needs of its members, extremely ambitious in its goals, and measurably effective in its outcomes.
I’m asking you to support the Girls Club in one of two ways:
The Girls Club serves girls who are amongst the most in-need in all of New York City, and boosts important measures like graduation rates to levels 15% higher than the district average. The way that the club does it is by providing year-round programming in the arts, STEM, civic engagement, leadership, wellness, college and career pathways, and much more — including a deep connection to a sense of community. All of this happens in a facility that is nothing short of magical, where there’s a green roof, a full recording studio, a commercial-grade kitchen, a wonderful crafting room, and even an actual planetarium. And all of these resources are made available to the girls entirely for free.
The programs and support that the team provide to the girls work. It changes their lives. I know this because I’ve seen it. Now that the club has been around for a generation, we’ve seen girls grow up to become incredible students, leaders in the community, entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and even a new generation of mentors in the Girls Club itself.
Then, the backlash against DEI and this kind of community support threatened the very survival of the Girls Club.
Even though the club has always had its share of ups and downs, there had almost never been as much of a concerted attack on its foundations until the dark times of this last year. It’s taken a toll on the club and its staff, and threatened to put the programming and support for the girls at risk. After a decade on the board, I stepped up to become chair of the board to try to help.
Because the truth is, the team at the club does what works: specific, local action, that considers individuals as whole humans, and tends to their needs in a complete way. We’ve given out tens of thousands of free meals to the community as needed ever since COVID began, because people can’t learn when they are hungry. We’ve added multi-generational classes on things like wellness, because it takes the support of entire families to keep kids on the right track for their education, or to support them making big, ambitious choices to change their lives for the better. And of course there is support for every form of creativity from technology to sewing to DJing to, yes, exploring the stars in the planetarium. Because, for too long, those were areas of imagination that didn’t always get presented as options on Avenue D.
Here’s what I can promise you: every single penny that you give to support this organization will be used incredibly efficiently. The staff of the organization show up every single day to fight for these girls, and their families, and this community. I can personally attest to how accountable and effective their work is. If you are able to donate, I’ll give you a personal tour the next time you’re on the Lower Eastside, and take you through the amazing facility so that you can see for yourself the impact that you’ll be having on the future of our city, and these girls.
Years ago, not long after I’d first joined the board of the Girls Club, we were trying to capture the spirit of what makes this place so special. It’s hard to articulate the energy, the brilliance, the optimism and spirit that the girls bring to the place through their sheer creativity and engagement. But eventually we settled on a few words that ended up becoming the slogan for the entire organization:
Joy. Power. Possibility.
I come back to those words a lot, even when things are hard, because I see it embodied in the work that has been done as alumni of the Girls Club have gone out into the world as young women who are now leaders and innovators and fearless voices across the city and across the country. We’re going to need your help to make sure we’re able to ensure that another generation of vulnerable kids get that same chance.
And the best part is that you can really experience the “joy” part of that motto if you join us at the Gala. Our annual fundraisers are not the usual stuffy nonprofit affairs. We’ve got a few tickets left for Webster Hall on May 7, where we’re honoring actress, writer, director, producer, activist and Lower Eastside legend Natasha Lyonne, H&M America’s Head of Inclusion and Diversity Donna Dozier Gordon, and our very own Lower Eastside Girls Club emerita Miladys Ramirez. Expect signature cocktails, an unforgettable dinner, and a dance floor you won't want to leave! I hope to see you there, or you can just give what you can and be there in spirit.