Note: Originally written (but never published) in 2020, then revisited and published in 2025. I’ve added annotations and extended reflections on trust in our AI-dominated era.

Wikipedia and the Sin of Omission

I just finished reading Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow. The writing was satisfying and the story was horrifying but relatable on many levels. I was on the last few chapters yesterday when I came across a passage that felt more personal than others because it discussed the project that I worked on, Wikipedia.

In the book, Farrow describes the painstaking process of bringing his research about Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer and other sexual predators (some convicted — some suspected) to NBC. We learn that NBC leadership actively blocked him from reporting on these topics, fostering a culture that accepted misogynistic behavior, retaliation, and sexual misconduct. Later, when the story was published in the New Yorker, NBC attempted to cover up their role in creating an environment where rape could be an open secret. In this context, Farrow mentions someone NBC paid to alter Wikipedia.

“NBC also hired Ed Sussman, a “Wikipedia whitewasher,” to unbraid references to Oppenheim, Weinstein and Lauer on the crowdsourced encyclopedia.” [1]

Farrow then describes various questionable edits and adds,

“Other times, he simply removed all mention of the controversies.”

The book quotes a “veteran editor” saying that it was:

“…one of the most blatant and naked exercises of corporate spin that I have encountered in WP and I have encountered a lot.”

Finally, the chapter concluded with the ominous sentence:

“It was almost as if it had never happened.”

Can Wikipedia be Trusted?

This chapter rendered Wikipedia meaningless in the age of paid coverups and catch and kill [2] purchasing. Why? Because for Wikipedia to work, we need to trust it. But what does it take to trust Wikipedia?

Does Transparency breed trust?

Many people think that in order to trust something you need to know how it works, so that’s the hypothesis I started with ; if readers knew how Wikipedia works, they’d be more likely to trust it. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot of research [3] showing that when Wikipedia readers saw how the “sausage was made,” that the readers in turn, felt that they could trust it less. But for the sake of conversation, let’s take a look at the sausage (a phrase my Jewish mother would be m̶o̶r̶t̶i̶f̶i̶e̶d̶ amused to hear me say).

Part 1: Reading Wikipedia

Lots of people read Wikipedia (understatement) via the Web, mobile apps or even through voice assistant services. There isn’t one Wikipedia to rule them all, but over 300+ Wikipedias, written and available to people in different languages. It’s not translated content, it’s localized content which means that for example, an article about the Middle East Conflict on English Wikipedia will have a different entry than an article on Arabic Wikipedia (ويكيبيديا العربية). This makes me appreciate Wikipedia a lot because it’s not history being recorded by the victors but in theory every vantage point of a story.

You do not need an account to read Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is or has been censored in several countries.

Here’s a screenshot of the English and French articles on Noah Oppenheim (mobile web versions). Note that while both articles generally have the same information here, the language is nuanced. In the English article it says he is “best known for attempting to stop Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct.” On the French article it says (this is my translation)“He’s accused by Ronan Farrow of concealing the facts of the Harvey Weinstein case.”

Part 2: Making an Edit

Let’s just imagine the scenario that you come to the page after reading the Farrow book and want to add information to the article about Oppenheim’s role in the Weinstein sexual misconduct case.

First you want to decide if you will be logged in or out of the encyclopedia when you make the edit. There are many reasons to log in including: attributing the edit to your name, tracking your edit history and watching the page and getting notifications when there are any edits on the page. However, if you don’t log in, you will be editing using your IP address, which is not anonymous, but not exactly openly identifying yourself either.

Next comes the business at hand: deciding what to write. So you have a quote from Catch and Kill about Oppenheim. The first question that I usually ask is “what fact does this quote validate?” followed up by “can I use this quote?” The first question goes back to the whole raison d’etre for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which means that it’s a collection of facts represented in a narrative form. The second question relates in that there are policies and guidelines in place to ensure that real facts get added in a consistent and appropriate manner. One of the core policies of the English Wikipedia is that articles should be written from the “Neutral Point of View” rather than advocating for one side in a dispute, articles should be written describing and contrasting different view points, and trust the reader to come to their own conclusion. Although, as James Forrester, a Wikipedia editor since 2002 and more recently also a software engineer (now Principal Engineer) at the Wikimedia Foundation, pointed out to me recently[4],

“This does not mean refusing to state facts — the Earth is round, the sky is blue, global temperatures are rising — but you shouldn’t mix up extreme fringe positions with real discussion; you don’t serve the reader by glossing over anti-vaccination advocacy, or pretending that climate change denial doesn’t exist.”

If you’ve gotten this far, from here on out is all about the technical task of editing the article. You can either edit the page in Full page mode (like a google doc, seeing the entire article and editing it at the same time) or zooming in to edit a section. You should reference the book and author through a citation and then provide a summary so other people can see what your intention is if they view the article revision history.

Part 3: Revising

As you examine the page, you might spot content that’s redundant or incorrect. You can edit it the same way. While deleting content can be controversial, you can never truly “whitewash” a page because Wikipedia maintains a revision history that logs every edit. Each edit record includes: time of edit, username of logged-in editor or IP address of anonymous editor, a link to view the article before and after the edit (the difference) and the amount of character change.

Additionally, editors typically write a summary describing their changes as an edit log. Revision histories exist for both article pages and discussion pages.

I chatted [5]with Carnegie Mellon University Phd student(with a research focus on Wikipedia), Andrew Kuznetsov (still accurate), about revision history in relationship to the Farrow book and he pointed out that:

“… the sin of omission is often caught by a centralized source that understands the entire picture. However, one thing that makes Wikipedia unique is editors don’t think in ‘content’, they think in ‘edits’. Thus, a removal of a sentence is just as noteworthy and documented as the addition of one.

He went on to say,

This presents a few unique opportunities for Wikipedia, compared to other social systems (especially ones that people use for news). You may not be able to see the history of a Facebook page and viewing deleted tweets on Twitter is deliberately difficult, but Wikipedia stores all this data (for free). As a consequence, edits that remove good information (a sin of omission) and those that add bad information (misinformation, basically) are surprisingly at near parity in their exposure to editors.

What Kuznetsov highlights is the sensemaking challenge for Wikipedia readers due to content decentralization. To editors, this is obvious, but readers need to think like content creators to understand how an article has been altered.

Part 4: Joining or Creating a discussion

If you return to find your edits gone and the page reverted, you have options. From the revision history, you can identify who made the change (username or IP address). You can then contact them via their user Talk page — an on-wiki profile page that editors personalize and use for direct, open communication.

Alternatively, you can take the more public route through the article discussion page. Every Wikipedia article has an attached discussion page where anyone can participate in improving the article. There are detailed guides on engaging in discussion pages — here or here — but what’s important is that discussing edits is an accepted and expected convention. As Forrester explained:

“Writing Wikipedia articles means working together when we’re all apart — separated by location, by background, by language, by experience, by values — means it’s easy to find ways that we disagree. Rather than making bold changes and hoping that people will agree to them after the fact, often you can quickly get to a better improvement by discussing ideas first and then, once agreed, make the changes in concert with others."

Is radical transparency the answer?

As I’ve explained, significant work happens behind each Wikipedia article. But if we want to increase reader trust, is radical transparency the solution? At minimum, we could explore design interventions like prominently displaying author information and edit timestamps in humane language on the article page. But would knowing that regular humans provide information and that ANYONE can edit it change your perception of the article? Of Wikipedia overall?

The Wikimedia Foundation product team constantly balances an open-source mission with mainstream appeal (which requires making the product accessible to a wide audience). I’d like to think that helping readers understand our commitment to radical transparency by exposing the inner workings on article pages would attract more writers. More editors means better quality content. My thinking is that more voices in the conversation prevent “textbooks” or “histories” from being written from just one perspective.

I view discussion pages and revision histories as valuable artifacts themselves. In my work, I explored the boundary between articles and the editing process behind them. I see a major design opportunity in blending these knowledge spaces within Wikipedia. But for any software to succeed, there must be partnership between the software and its users (both editors and readers). For Ronan Farrow to think more highly of Wikipedia, we’d need to design an ethical, radically transparent experience where you see both the article and editor activity simultaneously. This would require an epistemological shift where readers understand that collaborative content creation on the web is actually beneficial. Imagine a world where every reader felt empowered to be the change they wished to see and took to their laptops to research and fact-check?

Thanks to James Forrester, Adrian Fraser, Ed Sanders, Peter Pelberg, Sylvan Klein, and Amir Aharoni for helping me to articulate my thoughts.

2025 Thoughts

This holds up. I love that I used the words “epistemological shift” in that last paragraph. My updated question is — has that shift occurred with the introduction and spread of AI technology? Reading what I wrote five years ago feels like reminiscing about a bygone era, but I would argue this question of trust remains highly relevant. If I search Google for Noah Oppenheim today, this is what appears:

The content on the left side of the screen is AI generated from Google AI Mode, which according to Google’s The Keyword blog:

This new Search mode expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions. You can ask anything on your mind and get a helpful AI-powered response with the ability to go further with follow-up questions and helpful web links.

Using a custom version of Gemini 2.0, AI Mode is particularly helpful for questions that need further exploration, comparisons and reasoning. You can ask nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches — like exploring a new concept or comparing detailed options — and get a helpful AI-powered response with links to learn more.

From a UX perspective, Google presents an opinionated overview at the top of the page hierarchy and applies a hierarchical order to content display (similar to Wikipedia). For each entry, Google explains its logic and provides source links. This transfers the concept of trust back to the user, who must take the additional step of clicking these links to verify information.

Extensive research on AI and Wikipedia exists — including Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth, Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process? published by the NY Times in 2023. While this topic deserves its own blogpost, what’s striking is that after five years, the responsibility for truth-seeking still falls on the end-user. Google elegantly places links beside content (hidden under the link icon), while in the standard overview (a different search tab with less aggressive information presentation), sources appear more prominently alongside content (often pulling directly from Wikipedia).

I find Wikipedia’s approach to information access particularly valuable (as of 2025, speaking as an independent observer). The platform offers multiple intuitive ways for users to explore content. On desktop, you can simply hover over a wikilink to preview a summary before clicking through to another Wikipedia page. Similarly, citations can be previewed on desktop or easily accessed through the References section on both desktop and mobile devices.

Wikipedia’s “citation needed” tag stands out as an elegant call to participation. This feature appears when a reader questions the source of a fact and edits the page to request verification. What makes this system powerful is its accessibility — anyone can use this template . By encouraging users to flag unverified information, Wikipedia normalizes critical thinking rather than passive acceptance of presented facts. This raises an important question: when people engage with content, are they genuinely seeking truth?

— — — — — — — — — -

[1]Pages 399–400 of Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill detail the aftermath of reporting on Harvey Weinstein, revealing a conspiracy to suppress the story and media complicity, particularly at NBC.

[2]Catch and kill is a phrase that means that someone buys a story in order to never share it with the world. This was used by many organizations referenced in Ronan Farrow’s book as a way to keep women from “going public” with their sexual harassment claims (through NDA agreements). See: catch and kill on Wikipedia.

[3] There are lots of studies that describe how revealing Wikipedia’s process decreases reader trust. Two articles that I recommend are Your Process is Showing: Controversy Management and Perceived Quality in Wikipedia and Can You Ever Trust a Wiki? Perceived Trust and Wikipedia.

[4] James Forrester and I talked via Slack on May 5, 2020

[5] Andrew Kuznetsov and I talked via Slack on May 5, 2020

It's my 61st birthday this weekend and I have to say, I never expected to get to be this old—or this weirded-out by the world I'm living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in which two-fisted billionaires colonize space in order to get away from the degenerate second-hander rabble downstairs who want to survive their John W. Campbell-allocated banquet of natural disasters. (Here's looking at you, Ben Bova.)

Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that's going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup ...

I'm calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

It's pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we're seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point.

Until approximately 1750, humanity's energy budget was constrained by the available sources: muscle power, wind power (via sails and windmills), some water power (via water wheels), and only heat from burning wood and coal (and a little whale oil for lighting).

During the 19th century we learned to use combustion engines to provide motive power for both stationary machines and propulsion. This included powering forced ventilation for blast furnaces and other industrial processes, and pumps for water and other working fluids. We learned to reform gas from coal for municipal lighting ("town gas") and, later, to power dynamos for municipal electricity generation. Late in the 19th century we began to switch from coal (cumbersome, bulky, contained non-combustible inclusions) to burning fractionated oil for processes that demanded higher energy densities. And that's where we stuck for most of the long 20th century.

During the 20th century, the difficulty of supporting long-range military operations led to a switch from coal to oil—the pivotal event was the ultimately-disastrous voyage of the Russian Baltic fleet to the Sea of Japan in 1906, during the Russo-Japanese war. From the 1890s onwards Russia had been expanding into Siberia and then encroaching on the edges of the rapidly-weakening Chinese empire. This brought Russia into direct conflict with Japan over Korea (Japan, too, had imperial ambitions), leading to the outbreak of war in 1905—when Japan wiped out the Russian far-eastern fleet in a surprise attack. (Pearl Harbor in 1941 was not that surprising to anyone familiar with Japanese military history!) So the Russian navy sent Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, commander of the Baltic Fleet, to the far east with the hastily-renamed Second Pacific Squadron, whereupon they were sunk at the Battle of Tsushima.

Rozhestvensky had sailed his fleet over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) from the Baltic Sea, taking seven months and refueling numerous times at sea with coal (around a quarter of a million tons of it!) because he'd ticked off the British and most ports were closed to him. To the admiralties watching from around the world, the message was glaringly obvious—coal was a logistical pain in the arse—and oil far preferable for refueling battleships, submarines, and land vehicles far from home. (HMS Dreadnought, the first turbine-powered all-big-gun battleship, launched in 1905, was a transitional stage that still relied on coal but carried a large quantity of fuel oil to spray on the coal to increase its burn rate: later in the decade, the RN moved to oil-only fueled warships.)

Spot the reason why the British Empire got heavily involved in Iran, with geopolitical consequences that are still playing out to this day! (The USA inherited large chunks of the British empire in the wake of the second world war: the dysfunctional politics of oil are in large part the legacy of applying an imperial resource extraction model to an energy source.)

Anyway. The 20th century left us with three obvious problems: automobile driven suburban sprawl and transport infrastructure, violent dissatisfaction among the people of colonized oil-producing nations, and a massive burp of carbon dioxide emissions that is destabilizing our climate.

Photovoltaic cells go back to 1839, but until the 21st century they remained a solution in search of very specific problems: they were heavy, produced relatively little power, and degraded over time if left exposed to the sun. Early PV cells were mainly used to provide power to expensive devices in inaccessible locations, such as aboard satellites and space probes: it cost $96 per watt for a solar module in the mid-1970s. But we've been on an exponential decreasing cost curve since then, reaching $0.62/watt by the end of 2012, and it's still on-going.

China is currently embarked on a dash for solar power which really demands the adjective "science-fictional", having installed 198GW of cells between January and May, with 93GW coming online in May alone: China set goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 in 2019 and met their 2030 goal in 2024, so fast is their transition going. They've also acquired a near-monopoly on the export of PV panels because this roll-out is happening on the back of massive thin-film manufacturing capacity.

The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it's cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.

This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground. (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.

China is also banking on the global shift to transport using EVs. High speed rail is almost always electrified (not having to ship an enormous mass of heavy fuel around helps), electric cars are now more convenient than internal combustion ones to people who live in dense population areas, and e-bikes don't need advocacy any more (although roads and infrastructure friendly to non-motorists—pedestrians and public transport as well as cyclists—is another matter).

Some forms of transport can't obviously be electrified. High capacity/long range aviation is one—airliners get lighter as they fly because they're burning off fuel. A hypothetical battery powered airliner can't get lighter in flight: it's stuck with the dead weight of depleted cells. (There are some niches for battery powered aircraft, including short range/low payload stuff, air taxis, and STOVL, but they're not going to replace the big Airbus and Boeing fleets any time soon.)

Some forms of transport will become obsolescent in the wake of a switch to EVs. About half the fossil fuel powered commercial shipping in use today is used to move fossil fuels around. We're going to be using crude oil for the foreseeable future, as feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries, but they account for a tiny fraction of the oil we burn for transport, including shipping. (Plastic recycling is over-hyped but might eventually get us out of this dependency—if we ever get it to work efficiently.)

So we're going through an energy transition period unlike anything since the 1830s or 1920s and it's having some non-obvious but very important political consequences, from bribery and corruption all the way up to open warfare.

The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.

I was wrong repeatedly in the past decade when I speculated that you can't ship renewable electricity around like gasoline, and that it would mostly be tropical/equatorial nations who benefited from it. When Germany is installing rooftop solar effectively enough to displace coal generation, that's a sign that PV panels have become implausibly cheap. We have cars and trucks with reasonably long ranges, and fast-charger systems that can take a car from 20% to 80% battery capacity in a quarter of an hour. If you can do that to a car or a truck you can probably do it to a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle, insofar as they remain relevant. We can do battery-to-battery recharging (anyone with a USB power bank for their mobile phone already knows this) and in any case the whole future of warfare (or geopolitics by other means) is up in the air right now—quite literally, with the lightning-fast evolution of drone warfare over the past three years.

The real difference is likely to be that energy production is widely distributed rather than concentrated in resource extraction economies and power stations. It turns out that PV panels are a great way of making use of agriculturally useless land, and also coexist well with some agricultural practices. Livestock likes shade and shelter (especially in hot weather) so PV panels on raised stands or fences can work well with sheep or cattle, and mixed-crop agriculture where low-growing plants are sheltered from direct sunlight by taller crops can also work with PV panels instead of the higher-growing plants. You can even in principle use the power from the farm PV panels to drive equipment in greenhouses: carbon dioxide concentrators, humidifiers, heat pumps to prevent overheating/freezing, drainage pumps, and grow lamps to drive the light-dependent reactions in photosynthesis.

All of which we're really going to need because we've passed the threshold for +1.5 °C climate change, which means an increasing number of days per year when things get too hot for photosynthesis under regular conditions. There are three main pathways for photosynthesis, but none of them deal really well with high temperatures, although some adaptation is possible. Active cooling is probably impractical in open field agriculture, but in intensive indoor farming it might be an option. And then there's the parallel work on improving how photosynthesis works: an alternative pathway to the Calvin cycle is possible and the enzymes to make it work have been engineered into Arabidopsis, with promising results.

In addition to the too-many-hot-days problem, climate change means fluctuations in weather: too much wind, too much rain—or too little of both—at short notice, which can be physically devastating for crops. Our existing staple crops require a stable, predictable climate. If we lose that, we're going to have crop failures and famines by and by, where it's not already happening. The UK has experienced three of its worst harvests in the past century in this decade (and this decade is only half over). As long as we have global supply chains and bulk shipping we can shuffle food around the globe to cover localized shortfalls, but if we lose stable agriculture globally for any length of time then we are all going to die: our economic system has shifted to just-in-time over the past fifty years, and while it's great for efficiency, efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience. We don't have the reserves we would need to survive the coming turbulence by traditional means.

This, in part, explains the polycrisis: nobody can fix what's wrong using existing tools. Consequently many people think that what's going wrong can't be fixed. The existing wealthy elites (who have only grown increasingly wealthy over the past half century) derive their status and lifestyle from the perpetuation of the pre-existing system. But as economist Herbert Stein observed (of an economic process) in 1985, "if it can't go on forever it will stop". The fossil fuel energy economy is stopping right now—we've probably already passed peak oil and probably peak carbon: the trend is now inexorably downwards, either voluntarily into a net-zero/renewables future, or involuntarily into catastrophe. And the involuntary option is easier for the incumbents to deal with, both in terms of workload (do nothing, right up until we hit the buffers) and emotionally (it requires no sacrifice of comfort, of status, or of relative position). Clever oligarchs would have gotten ahead of the curve and invested heavily in renewables but the evidence of our eyes (and the supremacy of Chinese PV manufacturers in the global market) says that they're not that smart.

The traditional ruling hierarchy in the west had a major shake-up in 1914-19 (understatement: most of the monarchies collapsed) in the wake of the convulsion of the first world war. The elites tried to regain a degree of control, but largely failed due to the unstable conditions produced by the great depression and then the second world war (itself an emergent side-effect of fascist regimes' attempts to impose imperial colonial policies on their immediate neighbours, rather than keeping the jackboots and whips at a comfortable remove). Reconstruction after WW2 and a general post-depression consensus that emerged around accepting the lesser evil of social democracy as a viable prophylactic to the devil of communism kept the oligarchs down for another couple of decades, but actually-existing capitalism in the west stopped being about wealth creation (if it ever had been) some time in the 1960s, and switched gear to wealth concentration (the "he who dies with the most toys, wins" model of life). By the end of the 1970s, with the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the traditional wealthy elites began to reassert control, citing the spurious intellectual masturbation of neoliberal economics as justification for greed and repression.

But neoliberalism was repurposed within a couple of decades as a stalking-horse for asset-stripping, in which the state was hollowed out and its functions outsourced to the private sector—to organizations owned by the existing elites, which turned the public purse into a source of private profit. And we're now a couple of generations into this process, and our current rulers don't remember a time when things were different. So they have no idea how to adapt to a changing world.

Cory Doctorow has named the prevailing model of capitalist exploitation enshittification. We no longer buy goods, we buy services (streaming video instead of owning DVDs or tapes, web services instead of owning software, renting instead of buying), and having been captured by the platforms we rent from, we are then subject to rent extraction: the service quality is degraded, the price is jacked up, and there's nowhere to go because the big platforms have driven their rivals into bankruptcy or irrelevance:

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

This model of doing business (badly) is a natural consequence of the bigger framework of neoliberalism, under which a corporation's directors overriding duty is to maximize shareholder value in the current quarter, with no heed to the second and subsequent quarters hence: the future is irrelevant, feed me shouts the Audrey II of shareholder activism. Business logic has no room for the broader goals of maintaining a sustainable biosphere, or even a sustainable economy. And so the agents of business-as-usual, or Crapitalism as I call it, are at best trapped in an Abilene paradox in which they assume everyone else around them wants to keep the current system going, or they actually are as disconnected from reality as Peter Thiel (who apparently believes Greta Thunberg is the AntiChrist.)

if it can't go on forever it will stop

What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so. It's already leading to resource wars, famines, political upheaval, and insecurity (and when people feel insecure, they rally to demagogues who promise them easy fixes: hence the outbreaks of fascism). The ultra-rich don't want it to stop because they can't conceive of a future in which it stops and they retain their supremacy. (Also, they're children of privilege and most of them are not terribly bright, much less imaginative—as witness how easily they're robbed blind by grifters like Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman Fried, and arguably Sam Altman). Those of them whose wealth is based in ownership of fossil fuel assets still in the ground have good reason to be scared: these are very nearly stranded assets already, and we're heading for a future in which electricity is almost too cheap to meter.

All of this is without tackling the other elephant in the room, which is the end of Moore's Law. Moore's Law has been on its death bed for over a decade now. We're seeing only limited improvements in computing and storage performance, mainly from parallelism. Aside from a very few tech bubbles which soak up all available processing power, belch, and ask for more, the all you can eat buffet for tech investors is over. (And those bubbles are only continuing as long as scientifically naive investors keep throwing more money at them.)

The engine that powered the tech venture capital culture (and the private equity system battening on it) is sputtering and dying. Massive AI data centres won't keep the coal mines running or the nuclear reactors building out (it's one of those goddamn bubbles: to the limited extent that LLMs are useful, we'll inevitably see a shift towards using pre-trained models running on local hardware). They're the 2025 equivalent of 2020's Bored Ape NFTs (remember those?). The forecast boom in small modular nuclear reactors is going to fizzle in the face of massive build-out of distributed, wildly cheap photovoltaic power plus battery backup. Quantum computing isn't going to save the tech sector, and that's the "next big thing" the bubble-hypemongers have been saving for later for the past two decades. (Get back to me when you've got hardware that can factor an integer greater than 31.)

If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s.

But this year, 2025, is the pivot. This can't go on. So it's going to stop. And then—

On the memorial page to my dog Heloïse that it’s intentional you can’t find from the top level of my website, the MIDI the gramophone plays – rollicking! piano! badly charted if we’re being honest at least as far as the rhythm goes! – is the song I sang to her when she was sick. The page features pixel kitsch that goes far beyond what you see on Lialina’s archives for its being self-conscious and chosen in a latter era. And for all that affectation, even now: if I click on the thing and hear the music I cry.

Anyway. It’s obviously mortifying to admit, but I want to give you that as context before you go look at these pages about people’s dogs. Social media tuned all of our instincts for how to present ourselves online, how to signal to each other correctly. The web publishing people did before that tuning seems wildly different, and I think it’s easy for those who weren’t there to cringe at it, or to project something onto it that was absent at the time.

Well, I’ve put my money where my mouth is, so I guess I’ll form it as a prescriptive opinion: the sincerity of people loving their dogs So Much they had to write HTML about it is something we need more of in this world, even if it’s embarrassing at the edges.

Rituals? I can’t stop myself. They’re so good. Absolutely breathtaking. Humanity’s finest work, perhaps. They make no sense. It’s all about beauty, about made-up meaning, about art. Rituals add unnecessary, arbitrary extra requirements to a simple action. Light a candle first. Kneel. Wear a certain outfit. Carry flowers. Make this shape with your hands. Take off your hat, or put it on. Not that hat, the special one.

Pick up your feet in a car crossing the state line so you don’t drag it with you. (Be grateful, people of Vancouver and Portland, for my family’s care in this matter. Imagine the logistical nightmares otherwise incurred.)