I've never heard a paying SaaS customer complain that their subscription subsidizes free users.
That's just the model. Those who can pay cover those who can't, or won't. Everyone gets access, and the whole system becomes more useful.
In 1528, the Welser banking family of Augsburg struck a deal with Emperor Charles V: in exchange for debts the Emperor couldn't repay, they'd receive the Province of Venezuela to colonise and exploit. They called it Klein-Venedig, Little Venice. It lasted eighteen years, and it's one of the most instructive failures in colonial history.
For years, America has held a unique power through its global technology dominance. The US has greatly benefited from this position, but historically, it has not been overtly exploited in ways that were blatantly only for America's benefit.
The past few months of foreign affairs show a new America (or perhaps the same old America, but one) that is willing to openly exploit global dependence on American business for its own ends. As an example, the use of tariffs as part of a multi-pronged effort to acquire Greenland. The world has responded quickly to American destabilisation - 35% of Britons see US as unfriendly or hostile to Europe.
The timing of this could not be worse... for American tech.
If perfect knowledge is the theoretical endpoint of human understanding—an omniscient, frictionless clarity—then perhaps its inverse, incomplete information, is the essential condition of drama, comedy, and life itself.
During my computer science studies, our introduction to artificial intelligence didn’t begin with neural networks or robotics, but with a parade of definitions:
As a teenager, I was all ideas and no follow-through. Every week brought a new concept, a new scheme, a new startup in my head. I wore my imagination like a badge. But over time, I had to confront something uncomfortable: ideas weren't rare. They were a ten a penny, a kind of noise that kept me from actually doing the hard work.
In a recent piece, I made the case that we should stop trying to build "perfect" AI. That imperfection is not a failure mode — it's intrinsic to how these systems work. Here, I want to go one step further: not just to excuse AI's flaws, but to explore how we can use them. How we can design with imperfection in mind.
We seem to have stumbled into a strange contradiction: we demand perfection from our machines, while tolerating imperfection from ourselves. The same people who chuckle at human error in the workplace will denounce AI systems for the slightest misstep. "It hallucinated a fact!" Yes. And you never have?
The rapid rise of social media and digital platforms has reshaped global society, economics, and politics. Over the past two decades, America has notably thrived economically compared to Europe and other regions, which have experienced far slower growth. Rather than social media itself being inherently problematic, perhaps the real issue is what we've collectively lost in its ascendance: primarily local journalism, community vitality, and economic independence.
A useful way to understand the successes—and the stagnation—of big tech is through the lens of organisational advantage. Not just what a company did, but how it was set up to win.