2026-07-09 19:44:09
Last night, I had a 20-minute conversation about black holes. I'm not sure I've ever had such a long conversation about these celestial bodies before simply because despite having read several books on the topic, I've never found myself around anyone who I thought would want to converse in such things. And it wasn't just a fact-based back-and-forth, but more of an actual discussion about more nebulous concepts and ideas. Most importantly, the conversation was natural. As we got into it, it felt like we found a flow in our cadence of speaking. I say "we" but of course there was only one human being involved in the chat. The other entity was ChatGPT.
I have long thought about and written about the notion of interacting with computers using voice. Since I was a kid convincing my parents to buy expensive dictation software and microphones, this always just seemed like the way we would eventually interact with machines – and this was before I really started reading or watching science fiction. It's just obvious, right? In the era long before text messaging came to rule the world, the way we chatted with human beings wasn't via text, it was via voice. Sure, there were letters and the like, but that was more or less a hack to let your words travel long distances, or to the masses, before we had a way to transmit voice.
Obviously, there are upsides to using text. Many of them. And obviously it started as not just the dominant way to "speak" to machines, but the only way. And to this day, it's still the primary way. Depending on the workflow, it can be more efficient. But not always. And again, it was a system we came up with because there was really no option to get machines to "hear" let alone understand voice inputs back in the day. And the output back to you was another matter entirely.
But we're here now. Machines all around us can hear now.
AI, of course, was the missing link in all of this. Back when we still called it "ML", voice recognition finally got good enough for most dictation tasks. But the true "understanding" and ability to reply back to you took the LLM breakthroughs. I first wrote about this aspect just over two years ago when OpenAI rolled out GPT-4o – their first true "omni" model. But again, this was just a continuation of concepts that I was writing about a decade ago. Because again, I had been thinking about this stuff since I was a kid.
So naturally, I've had some real confirmation bias here and it has taken longer than it seemed for vocal computing to go truly mainstream. Yet slowly but surely, it is happening. You see it more and more in the streets and in offices – including, increasingly, doctors' offices – people dictating things to their phones. But despite 15 years worth of promises from Siri and later Alexa, true back-and-forth – actual conversations with a computer – have been lacking.
Some of it is cultural and societal, we've all grown up in a world where the primary input for computers – including smartphones – is text. But the bigger part has remained technical. It was still simply more efficient to use text for most tasks because you couldn't be sure voice would always work. Or voice just wasn't an option for many things. But mostly, it just wasn't natural. A back-and-forth with an AI chatbot was still just exactly that: a back and forth. You spoke and then had to wait for it to respond. Yes, the services starting with GPT-4o hacked together ways to allow you to interrupt to try to speed up interactions, but that often just confused both sides. With GPT-Live, it feels like we're finally overcoming this hurdle, allowing for a truly natural conversation with a machine.
The key to this is what OpenAI describes as a "full-duplex" architecture:
GPT‑Live is built on a full-duplex architecture, meaning it can listen and speak at the same time. During conversations, GPT‑Live can show it’s paying attention with phrases like “mhmm” or “yeah”, engage in quick back-and-forth, or just stay quiet when you need a moment to think. The result is a voice experience that is refreshingly easy to talk to.
And whereas before the voice models were different from the text-based models, now the vocal AI can pull from the same best models when responding.
In my experience over the past day of usage, it's still not perfect – there's too much of those "mhmms" and "yeahs" (which, one presumes, is not just about sounding more natural, but also buying some time to process – the draggggged out "let me checks" – which is a trick that humans leverage as well, of course!), but you can see – and hear! – a world in which this is perfected. Will it be exactly like talking to a human? Probably not, but would we even really want that? I mean, I'm sure some people would for certain use cases, including combating loneliness. And I'm sure services will perfect products and models for such use cases. But I actually quite like talking to a computer, knowing it's a computer, but still leveraging our natural and awesome speech capabilities as humans.
So, in my black hole conversation, I can push GPT-Live deeper and deeper down rabbit holes, whereas in a conversation with a human, this might be weird – or even pushy! And unlike with a human, I can take the conversation anywhere, because these machines have knowledge corpuses that know no bounds, quite literally. Forgive my French: that is fucking awesome.
Sure, it has long been awesome – perhaps the main awesome thing about LLMs in general. But there's something different that unlocks, at least for me, when I use voice to do this. Again, it just feels far more natural.
Yes, yes, there are concerns that what the machine is telling you isn't fully accurate. But actually, there are far greater concerns in this regard in conversations with humans! Great strides have been made in "hallucinations" over the past couple of years, but you should probably still retain some level of skepticism. Especially since, the flip side of the natural element of voice is that when something is said verbally with great confidence, you're naturally more inclined to trust what you're hearing. And AI has historically been the ultimate bullshitter. But again, people are guilty of this too!
Anyway, it feels like we're now fully on the cusp of a true shift in computing. Yes, I've long thought this, but it's step-by-step happening. And these new GPT-Live capabilities seem like they're going to unlock the space to the point where new devices may now be not just possible, but inevitable.
For now, these models and capabilities will be awesome to use on smartphones and laptops. While one aspect of the demo that Siri head Mike Rockwell gave during the WWDC keynote was undoubtedly because voice gives a far better demo than text, it also seems pretty clear that we're about to see millions of people out in the wild hitting a button to chat – vocally – with Siri. Finally.
And perhaps those who get really into this method of interaction start to venture into even more robust models such as those offered now by GPT-Live. And perhaps OpenAI leverages those capabilities to launch their own device sometime in the next several months. And perhaps many others follow suit once it's clear that this is a new path forward for computing.
As I always note in such posts, I'm not saying voice is the be-all-end-all of computing interaction. But I'm saying it's going to slot in as a new, more natural form of working with machines – much like Apple ushered in the more natural touch capabilities with multi-touch with the iPhone two decades ago.
My kids, who have grown up talking to Alexa to play music and get the weather are instinctively going to understand this new world in ways we cannot. That's exciting. And natural. They'll be able to go down rabbit holes talking about black holes or anything else they can possibly imagine. And they'll do so the same way they talk to people, with their voice.
2026-07-08 17:34:12
OpenAI is not building a phone. Amazon is not building a phone. And now SpaceX is not building a phone. Are you sensing a trend?
The trend is that basically the entire tech industry is rumored to once again be building their own smartphones. But they're all denying it. But all of the denials sound misdirecting at best and misleading at worst. Because of course they should be building such a device. As should Meta (again). And Microsoft (again). And everyone else who aims to control their own destiny. Because right now, Apple, and to a lesser extent, Google, does. And that's going to continue, perhaps well into the Age of AI.1
So the argument is really one of semantics. OpenAI isn't building a phone, they're building... something else. Amazon isn't building a phone, they're building... something else. SpaceX isn't building a phone...
2026-07-07 17:29:48
Move over Jensen, there's a new profit king in town. Well, in South Korea.
It was just six weeks ago when NVIDIA (once again) reported blockbuster earnings to the tune of $53.5B in operating profit in a single quarter. I had AI use some NVIDIA chips to figure out that this was an all-time record for such profit in corporate America,1 beating out even the longtime profit king, Apple.
Well, that record didn't last long – and again, didn't stay in America. Here's Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jason Karaian reporting for The New York Times:
Samsung Electronics said that its latest quarterly operating profit was nearly 20 times higher than last year’s, spurred by a seemingly insatiable demand for memory chips used in data centers for artificial intelligence.
The preliminary results for April through June, announced by the South Korean tech giant on Tuesday, underscore how the staggering investments that companies are making to build computing infrastructure for A.I. continue to propel earnings for memory chip makers to record levels.
Samsung said it generated an operating profit of 89.4 trillion South Korean won, or roughly $58 billion, in the second quarter. That was well above the 4.7 trillion won it earned in the same quarter last year, and more than it earned in 2024 and 2025 combined. The company’s revenue also more than doubled in the quarter, to about $112 billion.
No, that's not a typo, let alone many of them. Samsung's operating profit jumped almost 20x year-on-year. $58B. More than it earned in 2024 and 2025, combined.
Crazier still, it could have been more! From the Reuters report on the numbers:
Samsung posted better-than-expected earnings despite bonus-related provisions, as memory prices rose sharply," said Lee Min-hee, an analyst at BNK Investment & Securities.
Without those provisions, its operating profit would likely have exceeded 100 trillion won, analysts said.
100 trillion won is over $65B.2
Yes, per South Korean market reporting norms, the numbers are preliminary (with final ones due on July 30). Still. As recently as 2023, Samsung had reported $5B in operating income – for the year. Yes, this one quarter is over 10x all of 2023. Of course, that year was an outlier. Why? Memory chips! It was a downturn in that market – just three years ago – that ate nearly all of Samsung's profit. Now, of course, it's those very same chips which are fueling these incredible numbers.
Outside of 2023, normally Samsung makes between $25B to $50B a year in operating profit. Again, they just topped that in a single quarter. Because whereas Samsung used to be a consumer electronic company – and like Apple, mainly a smartphone company – now they're mainly a memory chip company.
If Apple has spent the past 20 years trying to figure out what, if anything, can move their fiscal needle after the iPhone, well, Samsung stumbled into it!
And I do mean stumbled because up until very recently, their chip division was a massive problem for the company. They simply could not compete with the likes of TSMC as a fab and SK Hynix on memory. Now, thanks to massive supply constraints, all three are amongst the most valuable companies in the world.3
Maybe, just maybe, Apple should get more into the chip business? They are for themselves, of course. But that doesn't make money (at least not directly) as much as it saves them money (and yes, helps to differentiate their products). Imagine if Apple had a memory chip business? I'm sure Tim Cook wishes that was an investment he had made a decade or two ago right about now...
Of course, the business will undoubtedly bust again at some point. And even with these incredible numbers, Samsung's stock is actually down around 10% at the moment because analysts were expecting even larger numbers! So there's probably no champagne at Samsung today despite these results – especially lest someone think the cork pop is the sound of the AI bubble bursting.
1 And I note "corporate America" simply because Saudi Aramco muddies this picture a bit – specifically one quarter in 2022 when the war in Ukraine led to an oil price spike that boosted their operating profits to the moon – perhaps to nearly $100B. Of course, much of that money immediately flows back to the government, so it's a... different world. ↩
2 Is that employee profit share agreement about to be renegotiated again? ↩
3 To be clear and fair, Samsung's fab business is still somewhat problematic, and perhaps lost money in this incredible quarter due to the aforementioned bonus payouts. But it's without question a good strategic business for Samsung to be in at the moment. Just ask Intel! ↩
2026-07-06 18:16:38
Is Netflix in trouble? That's sort of the question underlying Shaw's post above. He's quick to note that it's Netflix, and history has proven time and time again that you can't count them out because they're good at figuring out what's next to keep going. But it seems pretty clear that it's time to shake things up again.
Netflix shows have historically delivered their biggest ratings in the first season. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which often peaked in the middle of their run thanks to word of mouth, Netflix shows have lost viewers over time.
Yet the sharp drop in viewers is a major source of concern for the company, which has been studying its data to figure out why this is happening, according to people familiar with the matter. The service is ending The Night Agent after its next season. It renewed two comedies, Running Point and The Four Seasons, even though both shows surrendered more than 50% of their audience from season one.
To me, there are a few obvious problems here. The first is that a lot of the content just isn't very good. Yes, this is subjective. And yes, this quality concern has long been the case with Netflix – to the point that they have multiple times come out and said that they would start focusing on quality, not just quantity. And yes, none of this has really mattered in the past as Netflix growth continued unabated. But that didn't mean it would never matter. With streaming options maturing and rising in price, the others are getting pretty good at narrowing in on their niches and focusing on quality. Netflix remains the sort of fall-back must-have option, but it's increasingly seen as filler content. It's sort of like basic cable versus the premium cable of old.
To make matters worse, YouTube is coming fast and furious to take this market. Thanks to their nature – UGC content amassing eyeballs to the point where everyone feels like their content must be there in some capacity – they're simply better at it than Netflix. They're infinitely better at scaling content and so it matters less if it's a ton of garbage – there are plenty of gems too. Because there's just everything! YouTube is really out-Netflixing Netflix.
In other words, Netflix is getting squeezed. Both from the top from better quality streamers like HBO Max, Disney+, and even Apple TV. And now from the bottom with YouTube – not to mention all the FAST services.
Buying HBO Max by way of buying Warner Bros would have obviously helped with this problem. But it didn't happen. So again, it's time to re-think the strategy here. Maybe they actually – actually – focus more on quality and start to cut the crap. But it's also bigger than that.
The second issue I believe is tied to what has historically been their strength, their calling card even: the binge model.
Obviously it has worked out well for them – to say the least! – but I'm not sure it's working any longer. I've long thought it might be time to re-think this model – not necessarily abandoning it, but tailoring it for certain releases. For example, maybe a first season is released binge-style to get people hooked, followed by a more "traditional" second season that builds week to week. Or maybe you do what other streamers have long done in releasing the first few episodes to get people hooked then switch to week to week. There are just so many options here.
The "second season problem" Netflix seems to have suggests that one solution may be to do a first season binge (or partial binge) follow fast by a second season. In other words, get two seasons in the can at once. But that would be an expensive proposition, of course. Still, if you have a good sense of what will work for the audience, you could do it for some shows. But again, that sort of goes back to quality. And the issue remains that Netflix may be increasingly misreading their room.
Tangential to this, I do think that because Netflix releases so many shows, there's a inherent fear that some will (necessarily) not get renewed. This leads to a natural reluctance to commit. Again, less would be more here.
I continue to think the bigger shift should be shaking up distribution entirely. Some content goes to streaming but some goes to theaters. Some is binge-able, some is episodic. Some goes from a streaming show to a movie and others go the other way. Again, there are so many options here. But Netflix needs to leverage more than simply binge streaming. They're starting to with the shift to live and yes, the thawing stance on theatrical. But they should go all-in on this shake-up.
The path to $1T isn't paved with streaming alone. Obviously.1
In the past, Netflix has been insistent that the binge model works because their data doesn't lie. But the data may deceive. It could lead to content that people may get something out of but ultimately don't care about. The one-night-stand of shows, as it were. Data aside, it was impossible to argue with their growth. But suddenly, it's not so impossible, it seems!
1 I mean, should they buy Disney before Apple can? Hollywood would throw up at the thought, of course. But their throwing up on the Warner Bros deal likely just made things worse for the industry in the long run... ↩
2026-07-02 21:19:30
Meta has a problem. Well, two of them, actually.
First, after years and years spent trying to diversify, their business is still almost entirely advertising-based. To be clear, it's a great business – one of the best ever created, in fact. It's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem. Because if that business ever slows... Look out below.
That leads to the second problem. The latest way Meta thinks they can fix the first problem is with AI. Sure, they'll use AI to super-charge the ads business, but ideally it will also unlock other businesses for them. Again, to diversify. Currently, they view it as the key to their devices strategy, led by their smartglasses. But they're also working on other products and ways to potentially monetize AI beyond just selling ads. But the problem here is that it's expensive to build out those AI capabilities. Like, insanely expensive. Like the most expensive endeavor in human history, perhaps.
Wall Street doesn't like this. Specifically, Wall Street doesn't like this for Meta. Why? That first problem. Because unlike their Big Tech peers also clearly determined to pour all of their free cash flow into the AI build out, Meta doesn't have an obvious, direct way to monetize the capabilities. Again, there are ads, but that's indirect. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all selling their AI directly.
Are you seeing it yet? These two problems have a single solution. It's not simple, but it is fairly straightforward: Meta needs a cloud business.
It's a notion and solution that's so obvious that I've been noting it for quite some time now. After Meta bought Manus late last year (before they were forced to un-buy them), it occurred to me that at least part of the play was to get Meta into the business of selling products to other businesses. That is, enterprise sales. Granted, Meta has been trying to do this for years – remember Workplace, their short-lived Slack competitor? – but nothing has really worked. Again, Meta has remained the ads-based social media company. But Manus was already working. And beyond their consumer angle, there was clearly a big business brewing in selling agentic workflows to enterprises. As I concluded that post:
This deal seemingly makes a lot of sense for Meta on a few fronts. And it also may point to the start of a renewed push into enterprise. Again, easier said than done, but don't be shocked if this is a wedge of sorts. If they can keep Manus expanding into businesses, we should see other Meta cloud offerings follow, putting them more in line with those aforementioned Big Tech peers. And perhaps easing some concerns Wall Street has with regard to their AI spend.
Well, again, Manus, sadly, didn't really work out for Meta. But not because the business or the strategy wasn't good – if anything, those may have been too good, to the point where China took one look at the deal and said essentially: "yeah, no." Honestly, Meta probably should have used the "hackquisition" method to try to do the deal, but again, they clearly wanted the Manus actual business, not just the employees and some "non-exclusive rights". But I digress... The point is that with Manus, you could see a path for Meta to get a toehold into enterprise sales and expand from there – perhaps all the way up to a true cloud offering.
A few weeks later, another bit of Meta news made this general game plan even more obvious, at least to me. As I wrote about the formation of "Meta Compute" – their formal AI infrastructure play:
When I read about this new initiative within Meta, I can’t be the only one who assumes it will eventually lead to a full-on Meta Cloud, right?
Again, it seemed fairly obvious, though a number of people pushed back on the notion. Specifically because it would be so far afield from Meta's core business – and a huge potential headache, going up against the aforementioned Amazon, Google, and Microsoft clouds. That's obviously true, and I noted as much – in particular how it has taken Google years and several micro-pivots to be able to effectively compete in the space. Why? Because for as massive as Google is, and as good as they have always been with infrastructure, they didn't have the muscles to really do enterprise sales. It took bringing in someone like Thomas Kurian from Oracle to make that happen. And he has made that happen. To the tune of $20B in revenue a quarter – fast approaching a $100B/year business for Google. That makes it nearly 20% of Google's overall revenue – and again, rising.
My point is simply that Google, a company once knocked as being a one-hit wonder thanks to their ads business – again, one of the best businesses ever created – eventually found a way to diversify. It was painful and took a long time, but it worked. No one talks about them being a one-trick pony anymore. Meta has tried many things to diversify – going so far as to change the name of the company to one of those bets that, at least thus far, has not panned out – but they haven't tried the one that has worked so well for Google.
And so while some thought Meta doing a cloud business would be crazy because it's so far from their core, I viewed that as sort of the point. Again, they need to diversify! But one final element really drove this notion home: the AI build-out.
When Meta rolled out their first "Muse Spark" models in April, the most interesting element to me wasn't the models themselves but the idea of how they might sell access to them. As I wrote at the time:
One more thing: perhaps the most interesting element of the Muse movement is the notion that Meta intends to sell access via APIs. A first step towards a bigger Meta Cloud offering? You don't spend $140B a year for table stakes.
Even with these new models out there in the wild, and Meta's AI pivot from their failed Llama strategy seemingly on the cusp of being complete, Wall Street continued to throw up all over the company due to their CapEx spend without that clear path to directly monetize it.
Given their valuation as a private company, investors have started to worry about this as well for OpenAI. And so unsurprisingly, the company has started to say that they might be able to launch a cloud offering of sorts to help support their infrastructure build out. I've called this "Field of Dreams Economics" in the past – that is, if you build it (the data centers), they will come (the cloud customers). It's unproven at best, and folly at worst.
In walks Elon Musk...
In a way, Meta and xAI found themselves in the same boat having spent billions to try to catch up in AI and not having much to show for it. At first, it looked like throwing money at the problem would work, but now it looks more like they've built out and up a ton of compute capacity without the demand to truly put it to work. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft don't have this problem, because beyond the varying degrees of success for their own AI products, they have third-party customers. Which is to say, they have their clouds.
As a result, if anything, they each have the opposite problem: they're having a hard time striking the right balance between their own needs and those of their customers. In a way, at the highest level, this is clearly what drove Microsoft to push OpenAI away. As a customer of their cloud services – the most massive customer – they were eating Azure alive. These days, we have Google telling Meta that they need to cut back their compute usage. Anyway, what this all showcases is that the cloud demand is there – and rising.
And beyond AI services, raw compute is driving much of this. This, in turn, led Elon to connect the obvious dots on his own problem.
In an age where data center capacity is king, xAI found itself holding the crown jewels. They clearly didn't want to be in that position – they'd love for demand for xAI models to take up all available compute – but it's actually not a bad position to be in given the current situation. And that's especially true if you're, say, about to IPO and need a good narrative around why you merged your cash-incinerator (xAI) with your cash machine (SpaceX).
xAI is not a cash-incinerator, as it turns out – well, it still is, but not as big of one because it's also now a cash generator in the form of a neocloud!
Yes, Elon figured out a way to turn his space company into a cloud company too. He wants it to be an AI company, and it is, to some extent, but the better narrative is the cloud, because it's the far better business at the moment. And while the "neocloud" business isn't exactly what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft offer, it's arguably a far more straightforward cloud business. Granted, it's one that may be a moment-in-time thing given the capacity constraints that are even forcing even Big Tech to cut deals with the neoclouds to try to boost their capacity. Still, it's better than just burning money with nothing to offset it!
Zuckerberg clearly saw Elon's jujitsu maneuver in getting first Cursor to sign up to use xAI's compute, and then Anthropic, and finally Google. And saw how the market reacted: a huge potential weakness (AI costs) got turned around to help fuel the largest IPO in history. If everything else above made it clear that Meta would need to have a cloud business at some point, the SpaceX neocloud made it an imperative to happen – or at least be talked about – now.
Meta's stock is in the dumps? Zuck could simply pull the "Elon Lever".
And now he has. I've buried the lede some 1,750 words in, but yes, Meta is planning to launch a cloud business, reports Riley Griffin and Kurt Wagner for Bloomberg:
Meta Platforms Inc. is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models, setting up a new vector of competition with industry leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Meta, which has been rushing to secure expensive data centers and other infrastructure to fuel its own artificial intelligence ambitions, is forming a business to generate revenue from excess computing power sold to outside customers, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named as the details aren’t public.
There we go. But they're also seemingly torn in terms of what their cloud should offer:
One potential plan includes selling access to various AI models that are hosted on Meta’s existing AI infrastructure, an approach similar to AWS’s Bedrock offering, the people said. Meta would run the data centers and chips that power the models, including its own Muse Spark models, and charge developers to access them.
The company is also considering selling access to “raw” computing capacity, akin to other so-called neocloud businesses like CoreWeave Inc., the people said. Development of these new business lines is part of Meta Compute, an internal initiative to build and manage the company’s AI infrastructure efforts, according to a person familiar with the plans. Meta Compute is led by Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure; Daniel Gross, a leader inside the Meta Superintelligence Labs AI unit; and Meta President Dina Powell McCormick.
The answer may end up being both. The reality is that it will end up being whatever the market demands. And what investors end up liking. And sure enough, Meta's stock, after months in the Wall Street doghouse, shot up nearly 10% yesterday on this news.
Now, maybe it's all a head fake just to juice the stock, but it certainly doesn't seem that way. It seems like Meta is figuring out a way to launch a cloud service that will add to their top and bottom lines. And that should, in turn, help to diversify their business away from ads.
That doesn't mean they'll offer everything that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft do – and they probably shouldn't even try to do that. But they should probably have some sort of neocloud offering, at least to start, mixed with that 'Bedrock' competitor, which would include selling their own models via APIs. And perhaps they can even hark back to their "open source" AI roots by serving up DeepSeek models and the like.
Maybe down the road, Meta starts to augment their AI cloud with other types of cloud services. And maybe one day 'Meta Cloud' even makes up a double-digit percent of revenue. Or maybe it doesn't work, just as many of Meta's recent initiatives haven't.1 But it's certainly worth trying, for the optics alone, if not the actual business potential. It has been obvious and inevitable for a long time now.
1 Certainly I'm more than a little worried about Meta's ability to execute on much of anything, as I'm currently on day 3 of getting continuously banned by WhatsApp which they can't seem to fix...
2026-07-01 04:59:40
A couple years back, I was banned by Instagram. Because I happen to know a few people there,1 I got it resolved and my account back online relatively quickly. But I never got an answer for what actually happened.2 A few months later, I found myself banned again. Again, I pinged some people. Again I was reinstated. Again, I got no explanation other than someone – or something – messed up. Again.
While those bans also instantly took out Facebook and Messenger, I was lucky that it left WhatsApp alone. Because, living in Europe, I'm forced to run a lot of my actual life through WhatsApp because it's the service many people rely on here as their primary messaging service. Boy, it would suck if I was banned from WhatsApp.
As I just learned first-hand tonight.
Yes, that's right, for a third time in as many years, I've been banned by Meta. What for? Do you really have to ask? Nobody knows. My suspicion is that it's directly tied to the claiming of usernames on WhatsApp, which Meta opened up yesterday. After I claimed mine, it seemingly logged me out of my other active instances. And when I went to log back in... boom.3 Banned.
No explanation. No warning. Just a note that "This account can no longer use WhatsApp." As with Instagram and Facebook, you can submit a review of the ban and they say they'll look at it and let you know within 24 hours – but no promises. When I did this the first go-around with Instagram, I actually lost the appeal. Why? Nobody knows. Again, it took a personal plea. And I'm insanely lucky to be able to do that. As my replies then and now can attest, many are not so lucky. Many are just banned and never heard from again. At least on those services.
This is bullshit. How do I know this is bullshit? Because it literally happened to me! And, in fact, keeps happening to me! And I'll get it fixed again because I just so happen to know people, which is arguably worse bullshit!
But hopefully this blogpost, perhaps summoning some spirit from my late friend Om Malik, can help light a fire under Meta to actually fix some of this nonsense. I don't know who is minding the ship over there, but my fear is that no one is. That they've automated the shit out of all of these systems. And that they've laid off the people who used to be in charge of such things and stopped it from happening. And that AI is going to make all of this so much worse.
Further, the fact that Meta "hackquired" a company to be able to outsource the management of WhatsApp to India isn't making me feel better about any of this. I'm sure it's unfair, but it also sure looks like Meta is saying that a core social property, a service they acquired with billions of users, is no longer important enough to be run by their core team. [Update: I had written initially that the service would be run out of India, which wasn't clear at first, but apparently CRED founder Kunal Shah will be moving to Meta HQ, which is good, but the main point stands.]
They will, of course, suggest the opposite is true. That because the rest of the world is so important to WhatsApp that it should be run by a "hackquired" entrepreneur from that part of the world. But all I see in the news is that Meta was having a hell of a time monetizing WhatsApp after years and years and they think they found someone who can do that. Also, how have those other "hackquisitions" worked out for everyone? What I see is Meta no longer giving a shit about the product or the experience, just the monetization. They're ready to fucking milk it.
Yuck.
Why? To try to diversify away from their 98% reliance on advertising. Why? To try to get permission from Wall Street to keep spending on AI. Why? To try to finally find "what's next" now that they can no longer acquire entities like Instagram and WhatsApp. And also because AI will help them automate and supercharge the ads that they so heavily rely upon. And also the content moderation that they hate having to pay people to do. You know, like on WhatsApp.
Hold on. I just spoke to a friend who I communicate with primarily on WhatsApp. Apparently, they're sending me messages right now with no indication that I've been banned and that they're not getting through. What the fuck?!
I've fallen too far into the Meta org weeds here. Let me just point out that I run a lot of my household through WhatsApp – including childcare. Imagine if there was an issue with a child and someone was frantically trying to get ahold of me and couldn't because I've been banned? Honestly, should that even be legal?
Sure, I could not use WhatsApp, but again, I sort of have to. I can't force all of Europe to switch over to iMessage – though I would certainly like to right now! And so it feels like that Meta shouldn't just be able to ban you from a service you use to operate your life – especially since it's tied to your phone number. Maybe that's why they're switching to usernames? But fine, ban me, but tell the person trying to communicate with me – potentially about very important things in my life – that they need to reach me some other way. That these messages will not get through to me.
This is fucking insane, Meta.
Honestly, I would love to pull the plug on all Meta services in my life. I get little joy out of them anymore and far more pain and annoyance. It's just not clear to me that anyone at Meta really cares anymore, perhaps ever since the ill-fated name change of the company. They just keep searching for what they want to be next – gambling, GAMBLING! – while constantly neglecting what they actually are.
Update June 30, 2026: Well, as expected, I was un-banned... for about 5 minutes. I went to log-in to WhatsApp on computer and... immediately re-banned!
Update July 1, 2026: Was reinstated this morning. Went to log-in on my computer and surprise: immediately banned again. It's clearly amateur hour over at Meta right now. Or worse, AI hour?
1 I was/am user #28 of the service, having started using it months before it was actually live to the world. I've been verified for years. Still banned with no pings or warnings. ↩
2 And the wording was pretty wild. So wild that I won't even repeat it... ↩
3 My best guess would be that I use a lot of different devices and because of WhatsApp's clunky authentication process, they may not like seeing so many machines get logged in so quickly? I'm honestly not sure. But it all seems pretty clearly tied to the username situation. Which, if true, is stupid. Who could have known? ↩