It's Finally Weird Enough

"It's only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So, I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder, and weirder, and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is."

—Terence McKenna

This time last year, I painstakingly opened Figma after not using design tools consistently for quite a while—I had specialized in leading large teams for the better part of a decade and gotten severely rusty. I would touch Framer, some frontend. Have never been truly comfortable with code, or maths for that matter, but have always known and understood enough to grasp what was happening. This week alone, I've built an iOS app and a Mac app, and pushed front-end and back-end code straight to production without a team. Last year, I command-tabbed my way through a string of design apps to ship things. Today, I just have a browser and a terminal window open to do everything I did then, and more. In fact, my tools are proactively suggesting ways to do things better, faster, and easier. It's absolutely wild. It's fully changed how I work, how I think about building and managing teams, and how I think about the industry. In other words, I'm a tech guy who figured out Claude Code. Congrats on keeping up with 22-year-olds, Renn.

With the full commoditization of software design and development, allowing anyone to build anything as long as they have pockets deep enough to pay for tokens, the professional moat shifts further and further away from needing the practical skills, even mastering the practical skills, to the individual's ability to come up with novel ideas. Craft is table stakes now. Values, culture, and taste will be the remaining factors driving the success or failure of future software products.

I am optimistic about this way of working, while fully acknowledging the less-than-ethical ways today's tools have learned how to become this smart. But that optimism is mostly reserved for myself. I am lucky to be in a position where I am able to keep track of how the industry is evolving while adopting entirely new ways of working and thinking about the work. The majority of us will not be as lucky, and I worry deeply about the effect that will have on the world my sons are growing up in.

The tools I use to build are transforming faster than I can track. So is everything else. And my appetite for information, like my appetite for many other things that aren't necessarily great for me, is insatiable. It's moving very fast.

See, as I safely write the first edition of this newsletter from the Netherlands, I'm tracking a different reality on the feeds. I've seen events as they've unfolded, coming for such a long time. That's what my brain does. It connects things that shouldn't connect, usually before I want it to. Friends and colleagues in the US are in mourning. They are angry. They are frightened. Some are making plans. Some are going quiet—the same way I went quiet years ago when the cost of speaking felt higher than the reward. Communicating opinion has real-time consequences in a world where multiple realities are in conflict for mainstream acceptance. And the art of manufacturing realities has never been easier.

We used to say everyone's entitled to their own opinion. Then it became everyone's right to their own facts. Now, if you have enough money, enough reach, enough infrastructure, you can build your own reality. Not just have beliefs that differ, but actually construct your reality, and broadcast it. Make it feel inevitable to millions who will adopt it as truth. This used to take governments decades, shaping how a population saw the world. Now, of course, this isn't new; propaganda has always existed. The tools are more accessible, allowing some of us to see behind the curtain, but the mechanics are still the same. What's new is the scale. The sophistication. We moved from misinformation to competitive reality construction. Multiple overlapping worlds, each with its own heroes and villains.

This month, I set several goals for myself: mostly things I haven't been able to get to for years. COVID isolation bled into moving back to the Netherlands, to the town I grew up in, the place I spent my teens desperate to escape, now the place I'm raising my kids. I traded San Francisco for a place that I couldn't wait to escape while growing up. I had become too self-conscious and critical to express my voice. A good friend reminded me to write for myself and read Sivers' Useful Not True, which provided much-needed perspective. I want to be the hero in the reality of my sons. I'm learning to make amends with having been a villain to others, many times, and part of this newsletter is finding comfort in my own discomfort with our realities—honestly just trying to make sense of things while thinking out loud.

Some of these may be philosophical, some practical. I will try to write without restraint.

Welcome to my newsletter, Broken Screens. It's weird out here. Let's talk about it.

Things on the internet I found interesting lately: