There’s something profoundly different about Pride when it’s not just a party. Don’t get me wrong — I love a parade and the excuse to day-drink with glitter on my cheeks (both) as much as the next person. But Pride 2025 felt heavier, more urgent. When your very existence is under legislative assault, throwing on that rainbow flag becomes an act of defiance rather than just celebration. I came out as gay in 2005. The world feels like a scarier place now than it did then.

As someone who’s spent years working in civic tech “for good” trying to make the world a little bit better, I’ve watched governments weaponize policy against vulnerable communities before. But 2025? This really is different. More coordinated. Cruel. And yet my community’s response has been nothing short of extraordinary.

When the Government Comes for Your Kids

Let’s start with the gut punch that landed right in the middle of Pride month. On June 17th, the Trump administration announced they were shutting down the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ+ Youth services^[1]. You know, the hotline that had helped 1.3 million young LGBTQ+ people since 2022. The one serving kids who are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.

The timing was deliberate. Cruel. Almost impressively evil.

This came after January’s executive orders that essentially erased trans people from federal recognition^[2] and banned gender-affirming care for anyone under 19^[3]. Because apparently, “protecting children” now means denying them life-saving medical care and cutting off their suicide prevention resources.

But here’s the thing about targeting kids — it pisses off literally everyone who has a functioning heart. And that includes a lot of Republicans who suddenly discovered they have trans grandchildren and gay nephews.

The Numbers Game From Hell

The statistics this year read like a horror novel set in a legislative house in hell. 942 anti-transgender bills under consideration across 49 states^[4]. Nine hundred and forty-two. That’s a coordinated campaign.

And it’s working. The Supreme Court dropped their anti-trans healthcare decision right in the middle of Pride month—June 18th^[5]. Twenty-seven states now ban some form of gender-affirming care for kids. Six states make providing such care a felony. The hate crime numbers? 2,949 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents reported to the FBI, with more than one in five of all hate crimes now targeting our community^[6]. GLAAD tracked an additional 918 incidents just in 2024—that’s 2.5 attacks on LGBTQ+ people every single day^[7].

These aren’t just numbers. They’re our friends, our kids, our community members getting harassed, threatened, and hurt for existing. This is my family.

Corporate Cowardice

And where were our supposed corporate allies during all this? Mostly hiding behind carefully worded statements about “focusing on our core business values” while quietly withdrawing Pride sponsorships. 39% of corporations scaled back their public LGBTQ+ engagement this year^[8]. Target—Target—got rejected as a sponsor by Twin Cities Pride because they’d already caved to right-wing pressure.

Honestly? Good for those Pride organizers. We’re all tired of companies that want our money but won’t stand with us when it gets hard. The retreat of corporate sponsors forced Pride events back to their grassroots, activist roots. The budgets were smaller, the parties less flashy, but the message was louder: we’re not going away.

When the World Gives You Hope

While America was busy legislating us out of existence, other parts of the world were moving forward. Thailand became the first Southeast Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage on January 23rd, with over 1,754 couples getting married on day one^[9]. Australia completed nationwide non-binary recognition^[10]. The Czech Republic ditched sterilization requirements for legal gender changes^[11].

Even in the UK, where the Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t legally women^[12] (because apparently British judges missed the memo about basic human dignity), Hungary passed a constitutional ban on LGBTQ+ events^[13], and Viktor Orbán continued his slide into authoritarianism, people kept fighting back. Budapest’s mayor organized Pride as a “municipal celebration of freedom” with backing from 33 foreign embassies^[14].

WorldPride: The Resistance Gathers

Which brings me to WorldPride in Washington DC. 2-3 million people descending on the nation’s capital during the most hostile federal environment in decades^[15]. The parade route literally passed within one block of the White House. The symbolism wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t supposed to be.

This wasn’t just a celebration; it was a demonstration. A reminder that we’re still here, still fighting, still incredible. Jennifer Lopez performed. RuPaul showed up. Kamala Harris sent a video message. But more importantly, millions of ordinary LGBTQ+ people and allies gathered to say “no” to erasure.

The “March For All” initiative let people march on behalf of LGBTQ+ individuals worldwide who can’t march safely themselves^[16]. In a year when visibility felt dangerous, making ourselves seen became an act of solidarity with those who couldn’t.

Political Wins That Actually Matter

At least we’re getting better representation in government. Sarah McBride became the first trans member of Congress. Julie Johnson became the first LGBTQ+ representative from a Southern state. Emily Randall made history as the first LGBTQ+ Latina in Congress^[17]. Twelve LGBTQ+ House members total—a record.

It matters to have people in power who understand that our rights aren’t theoretical policy debates but literal life-and-death issues for their constituents.

The Organizations Doing the Real Work

Every single one of our lives is better with trans people in it. Trans people are teachers, doctors, artists, engineers, parents, friends. They’re the nurse who holds your hand in the hospital, the teacher who sees potential in the weird kid, the neighbor who checks on your elderly parent.

The fight against trans rights isn’t really about bathrooms or sports. It’s about whether we’re going to be the kind of society that protects its most vulnerable members or throws them to the wolves for political points.

Trans people—especially trans women of color—have been at the forefront of every major LGBTQ+ rights victory. Stonewall was led by trans women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. The movement for marriage equality was built on decades of groundwork laid by trans activists who never got to see their own recognition.

We owe them everything. And right now, they need us to show up. So, as we finish the month of June, I want to draw your attention to three organizations that deserve your money right now:

Trans Lifeline runs the only national crisis hotline staffed entirely by trans operators. They refuse to call emergency services without caller consent, understanding that police involvement often makes situations worse for trans people, especially trans people of color. With a 4/4 star Charity Navigator rating, they’ve been literally saving lives since 2014^[18].

Donate at translifeline.org

Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE) emerged from merging two powerhouse organizations—the National Center for Transgender Equality and Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. They’re the people fighting in courts and Congress, with a perfect 100% Charity Navigator score and over 20 years of experience getting things done^[19].

Donate at a4te.org

Transgender Law Center (TLC) is the largest national trans-led civil rights organization, prioritizing BIPOC communities and fighting landmark cases like the one that established rights for transgender inmates. Also rated 100% by Charity Navigator, they’ve been in the trenches since 2002^[20].

Donate at transgenderlawcenter.org

The Work Continues

Pride 2025 reminded me why I got into civic tech in the first place. Technology alone can’t solve systemic oppression, but it can amplify voices, connect communities, and organize resistance. The apps that help trans people find safe bathrooms, the platforms that let LGBTQ+ youth connect with supportive adults, the databases that track anti-LGBTQ+ legislation—this is tech serving justice.

The attacks on our community are unprecedented, but so is our response. We’re not just surviving; we’re building something better. Pride 2025 wasn’t just about celebrating how far we’ve come. It was about committing to the work still ahead.

Because here’s what I know after watching this community fight for decades: they can pass all the laws they want. They can retreat their corporate sponsorships and write their hateful op-eds. But they cannot legislate us out of existence.

We’re still here. We’re still fighting. And we’re still beautiful.

Support the organizations doing the real work. Show up for your trans friends and neighbors. And remember: our liberation is bound up together.

Enjoying the newsletter? Gimme $2 for sea-monkeys.

This week’s question comes to us from Dana Chisnell:

How do I get through a day without hearing or seeing anything about AI?

Let’s talk about basketball. My very favorite day of the year is the Saturday the NBA Playoffs kick off, which this year fell on April 19th. (Holy shit, the playoffs last forever.) On Playoff Saturday I get to watch four back-to-back-to-back-to-back basketball games starting at 10am. Same thing on Sunday. Then they start scattering them throughout the week. But that first weekend is pure joy and chaos. You’ve got teams pacing themselves because they believe they’re making a deep run, you’ve got teams that know their only chance to make it to the next round is to do very weird things that the other team isn’t expecting, and you’ve got guys on those latter teams playing for new contracts so they’re doing even weirder things to get noticed. All of this makes for very entertaining basketball. Which is not what you asked me about. We’re getting there.

This also means that for the last two months I’ve been watching a lot of TV ads. I am now an expert on three things: online gambling, GLP-1 drugs, and AI.

Here’s the thing about AI ads: they’re amazing. According to some of the ads I’ve seen, AI will help you write a paper, grade your students’ papers, sheetrock your wall, raise your children, send out invoices, design your website, write your résumé, schedule your aunt’s funeral, give you a good recipe for chicken wings, help you put together an outfit that slays, help you build a LEGO, write a sales report, summarize a sales report, tell you what kind of music you like, put together a good dating profile, teach you how to fire a gun, tell you who to vote for, and recite interesting facts about Hitler.

Here’s the thing about actual AI: aside from the Hitler part, it does precious fucking little of that. But it demos really really well. It’s really easy to make a good AI ad. You come up with a thing that a lot of people hate doing, you decide that AI can do that thing, then you shoot the ad that backs it up. You show it 17 times during Game 6 of the Knicks/Pacers series and 8 million people see it. Subtract a percentage of people who naturally distrust whatever is being advertised on TV and even if that number is 50%, you’ve still convinced 4 million people that Google AI can tell you how to repair a giant hole in your living room wall, which it cannot.

When I was a kid I was mesmerized by the comic book ads for Sea-Monkeys. “Enter the wonderful world of amazing live Sea-Monkeys! Own a bowlful of happiness! Instant pets!” This was the headline next to an amazing illustration of a family of Sea Monkeys posing in front of their Sea Monkey castle. With their big smiles, three-antennae heads, Sea-Monkey dad’s tail strategically covering his Sea-Monkey dick, and Sea-Monkey mom looking like she could get it, with her little Mary Tyler Moore flip-do. There was another illustration of a human family, straight out of the John Birch society playbook overseeing their Sea-Monkeys living in a fishbowl. Reader, I wanted these Sea-Monkeys. They were going to be my new family. So I waited for my Dad to be in a good mood (about to leave for the evening) and I asked him for a dollar. “Only $1.00!” just like the ad told me to say. I filled out the coupon in the ad very very carefully, cut it out very carefully with my mom’s good scissors, put it in an envelope, which I also addressed very carefully, asked my mom for a stamp, and the next day I deposited the envelope in a mailbox on my way to school. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more.

About 6–8 weeks later I received an envelope back. I ran to my room, where I had a goldfish bowl ready and waiting, opened the envelope, which contained a second smaller envelope, and dumped the contents of that envelope into the fishbowl. I watched as maybe three tiny-as-fuck brine shrimp made their way slowly through the water in the fishbowl, and landed on the bottom with the sound of a deflating dream. From the future, I saw Nelson Muntz point at me and say “ha ha!” And still, I checked that fishbowl on the hour for days. Maybe it just took a little time for my Sea-Monkey family to wake up. It never happened.

AI is Sea-Monkeys.

The promise is there and it’s exciting. The hope of new friends that will live, laugh, love in a little fishbowl next to my bed. Keeping me company. Laughing at my jokes. Saying things like “We wish you could come down here and play with us in our super cool Sea-Monkey castle.” The reality is three dead brine shrimp at the bottom of a fishbowl that your mother eventually flushes down the toilet after calling you an idiot. At least dead brine shrimp don’t tell you that Hitler had some good ideas, actually.

Can AI be useful in certain circumstances? Sure. So are brine shrimp. (They’ve been to space!) Is it all that? It’s not. AI is a Sea-Monkey ad being peddled as a promise of something that it is not.

Sea-Monkeys were my first experience with hype cycles. In retrospect, $1 was a good price for that lesson.

But again, this was not your question. And you already know that, which is why you’re asking the question. Still, it’s worth exploring why we’re seeing and hearing so much about AI right now. Ironically, this will add one more essay to the amount of essays that you’re wishing you could get away from. But having asked the question, you kind of did that to yourself.

Why are we seeing 17 AI ads during a Knicks/Pacers game? One answer is that the tech companies running the ads can afford it. (Ads run around $300k during the later rounds. That number may be wrong, it came from a Google AI summary.) But that speaks more to the how than the why. The why is simple, though. These companies need a hit, and they need a hit bad. Silicon Valley is in a slump. After striking out with blockchain, crypto, NFTs, web3, the metaverse, stupid shit you wear on your face (or more honestly, don’t wear on your face), and pretending (but not really able to actually fool anyone) that they gave a shit about minorities for a brief moment in 2020, the tech industry was losing the room. Mind you, they were still making money hand over fist, but the bloom was coming off the rose. They were coming off an insane couple of decades of innovating at a furious pace, being seen as gods, being invited to all the good parties, and settling into a mature age of “running things while making incremental improvements, with the occasional breakthrough” which, frankly, doesn’t make the cocaine flow. At the same time they were being asked hard questions about weird little things like “was your platform instrumental in a genocide in Myanmar” and “what’s with all the Nazis?” Which, to be fair, are bummer questions. Especially when you’re trying to enjoy cocaine.

So when AI got to the point of almost-kinda-sorta-semi maturity (but not really) they ran with it. Then they tossed in anything else that kinda-sorta felt like AI and tossed that onto the pile as well. Suddenly everything is AI and AI is in everything. Stuff that’s been around forever, like auto-complete and speech-to-text, is now “AI.” It’s not. Suddenly, Google Drive is asking me if it wants me to let AI write these newsletters. I don’t. Suddenly, Google search—the backbone of the internet—is a piece of shit. (OMG, were those em dashes?! Is this AI. Butterfly meme!) Suddenly, students and professors are arguing about who’s writing and grading papers. Suddenly, we’re firing up Three Mile Island so incels can generate six-fingered girlfriends that don’t give them shit for being useless. Suddenly, designers who were previously tasked with making things “user-centered” (This was never a thing, by the way, but that’s beyond the purview of today’s newsletter.) are being tasked with creating good prompts, and then staying up all night manually fixing the slop that was generated while also fearing for their livelihood because… suddenly everyone is unemployed. (Oh, did you think Silicon Valley was trying to artificially extend the bubble for your benefit? My sweet summer child.)

And the Nazi problem was solved by just becoming Nazis themselves. (What if the bug was the feature? S-M-R-T!)

I have yet to answer your question. Which is how you avoid all this shit. Well, it’s hard. Seeing that I can’t even watch a basketball game without being inundated with it. The honest answer is that you’re not going to be able to completely. At least for a little while. The enshittification of everything that previously worked just fine is still speedrunning to the lower circles of hell where venture capitalists count their money. I’m currently hanging on to an old laptop, which mostly works just fine because I know that a new one will be swarming with AI crap. I’m currently hanging on to an old phone for the same reason. Oddly, the shit they thought would re-energize our interest in these things back to a time when people would line up for the latest model of both, has seemingly had the opposite effect. And the folks getting suckered in because the ads are amazing, and because AI demos very well, will eventually realize that what they were sold, and what arrived at the door are two very different things.

But you don’t need to believe me when you can believe Roxanne Gay:

It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

AI is Sea-Monkeys. AI is hope in exchange for something that’s dead.

Fun fact I just discovered! The company that sells Sea-Monkeys still exists! They just celebrated their 65th anniversary. Good for them. They’ve rebranded to some vague environmental toy you’d find at an aquarium gift shop. But now you get the whole thing at once. No more advertising in comics. No more sending in an envelope with a dollar bill and waiting. Some things never change though. From their FAQ: I HAD A BUNCH OF SEA-MONKEYS BUT THEN THE NUMBER DWINDLED. WHY? Sadly, that’s common in nature. Many babies will hatch knowing that only the strongest will make it to adulthood.

Nature is fucking brutal.

Will AI still be with us in 65 years? Well, as much as I’m confident that anything might still be here in 65 years, sure. The hype cycle will eventually crash, and the parts of AI that actually make people’s lives easier will possibly live on, having safely extracted itself from the hype cycle. And before you write your “well, actually” response… you can’t get mad at people for conflating all the different types of AI, when you purposely threw them all together to build your hype cycle. You did this to yourselves.

I don’t know which parts of AI will survive, but they’re mostly likely not in generative AI. Turns out people like making things.

Silicon Valley’s era of innovation is over. This is their villain era. The era of the con. Having bled themselves dry of ideas, and all sense of moral decency, they’re now attempting to bleed us dry of our own humanity. And lest you think I’m being cynical, my cynicism towards technology comes from a belief in people. I believe that people are capable of good things. I believe people are even capable of great things. I believe that people make great art. I believe that people enjoy making all types of art. I believe that people write amazing things. (People don’t save each other’s love letters because they’re great literature.) I believe that people, at their best, want to communicate, not just with each other in the here and now, but also with those that will hopefully come after us. We want our descendents to know we were here, we want them to know we made things, we want them to know that we talked funny (our descendents will think we talked funny.)

I know this because I’ve seen us do this. I’ve seen us examine the past. I’ve seen us look for evidence of our ancestors. (I’ve also seen us hide evidence of our ancestors.) I’ve seen us gather in museums to see the art our ancestors made. I’ve seen us gather in movie houses to see the movies our ancestors made. Every Nina Simone song. Every Velvet Underground album. Every Ibsen play. Every Cindy Sherman photo. Every Greek myth. Every letter written from a Birmingham jail cell. Every note from Coltrane’s saxophone. It’s the indestructible beat of humankind. Calling from the past to let us know that we love to make ourselves heard, seen, felt and touched.

It’s what we do.

🙋 Got a question? Ask it! I might answer it. Or more likely, pretend to answer it while writing about what’s already swimming in my head.

📣 There’s a few slots left in next week’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop. You should sign up.

🤖 Speaking of AI, here’s an excellent article about why all the tech leaders decided to be nazis.

💸 If you’re enjoying the newsletter and can spare $2/month, I will take it!

🦐 If you are also broken and found Sea-Monkey Mom attractive here is a very stupid thing you can buy.

🧺 Here’s a very stupid and sexy enamel pin you can buy.

🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

🏳️‍⚧️ …and to Trans Lifeline.

🚰 Say hello. I love hearing from you.

Like many others, I became a little obsessed with Andor over the past few months. I was lukewarm on the first season when it came out, but a pre-s02 rewatch completely changed my tune — I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television. Season 2 was almost as good and the whole thing together was really affecting, thought-provoking, and just marvelously well-done.

In this interview with conservative NY Times’ columnist Ross Douthat, series creator Tony Gilroy nails why the show was so interesting:

The five years that I have been given are extremely potent. You have the Empire really closing down, really choking, really ramping up. The emperor is building the Death Star.

They are closing out corporate planets and absorbing them into the state. They are imperialistically acquiring planets and taking what they want. The noose is tightening dramatically.

There still is a Senate. There are senators that are speaking out impotently.

The Senate has been all but completely emasculated by the time this five-year tranche is over.

And there are revolutionary groups, rebellious groups, and people who are acting rebelliously, who wouldn’t even know how to describe themselves as part of any movement. There is a completely wide spectrum of unaffiliated cells and activists that are rising independently across the galaxy.

At the same time, you have a group of more restrained politicians who are trying to make an organized coalition of a rebellion on a place called Yavin, which will end up being the true end of the true victory of the Rebel Alliance.

I wanted to do a show all about the forgotten people who make a revolution like this happen — on both sides — and I want to take equal interest and spend as much time understanding the bureaucrats and the enforcers of the rebellion. I think one of the fascinating things about fascism is that, when it’s done coming after the people whose land it wants and who it wants to oppress and whoever it wants to control, by the time it gets rid of the courts and the justice and consolidates all its power in the center, it ultimately eats its young. It ultimately consumes its own proponents.

The rest of the interview is very much worth a read as well, particularly the bits where, for example, Douthat presses Gilroy on Andor being a “left-wing show”, Gilroy says no, Douthat scoffs, and, sensing Douthat is telling on himself, Gilroy fires back, “Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?” And Gilroy continues later:

You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive?

Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.

That is what actors do: I’m going on Broadway, I’m playing a villain for six months. I got to live in that. I’m playing the slave, I’m playing the fisherman, I’m playing the nurse, I’m the murderer — you have to get in there. You have to live lives through other people. I think that the simple act of that transformation and that process automatically gives you what I would describe as a more generous and progressive point of view. It just has to.

Like I said, well worth a read/listen. (via sippey)

Tags: Andor · interviews · politics · Ross Douthat · Star Wars · Tony Gilroy · TV

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

… doesn’t exit.

I can’t find the post anymore, but a month or three ago, Miriam Eric Susanne posted something about how we keep building extremely problematic tools with the promise that we’ll work out all of the bad stuff at some imagined point down the road.

Sure, it uses 8x as much water to do the same thing. But look how cool it is! We’ll figure that before we launch.

But you know what happens. They don’t.

And then it launches, and does massive amounts of harm to lots and lots of people.

And people say stuff like…

Sure, it’s got some problems now. But we’ll solve for that later.

I’ve even heard people argue that AI’s massive environmental destruction is “fine, actually,” because…

What if AI comes up with the solution to global warming?

It won’t. It can’t.

And even if it could, throwing puppies into the puppy killing machine to solve the puppy death problem is immoral and fucking stupid.

There is no magic wand. Problematic tech doesn’t work itself out over time.

If anything, the systemic issues become further entrenched, and eventually, every just accepts them as a price of doing business.

Do not accept “we’ll figure that out later” as a response to pointing out meaningful problems. It’s a con.

Solve the problems or abandon the project.

Need front-end help but don't need a full-time employee? I now offer subscription front-end engineering. Ship faster and build better systems. Pause or cancel any time.

Cheers,
Chris

I was on a panel on “AI” yesterday (was in German so I don’t link it i this post, specifics don’t matter too much) and a phrase came up that stuck with me on my way home (riding a bike is just the best thing for thinking). That phrase was

AI systems are just tools and we need to learn how to use them productively.

And – spoiler alert – I do not think that is true for most of the “AI” systems we see sold these days.

When you ask people to define what a “tool” is they might say something like “a tool is an object that enables or enhances your ability to solve a specific problem”. We think of tools as something augmenting our ability to do stuff. Now that isn’t false, but I think it hides or ignores some of the aspects that make a tool an actual tool. Let me give you an example.

I grew up in a rural area in the north of Germany. Which means there really wasn’t a lot to to TBH. This lead to me being able to open a beer bottle with a huge number of objects: Another bottle, a folding ruler, cutlery, a hammer, a piece of wood, etc. But is the piece of wood a tool or is it more of a makeshift kind of thing that I use tool-like?

Because an actual tool is designed for a certain way of solving a set of problems. Tools materialize not just intent but also knowledge and opinion on how to solve a specific problem, ideas about the people using the tools and their abilities as well as a model of the problem itself and the objects related to it. In that regard you can read a tool like a text.

A screwdriver for example assumes many things: For example about the structural integrity of the things you want to connect to each other and whether you are allowed to create an alteration to the object that will never go away (the hole that the screw creates). It also assumes that you have hands to grab the screwdriver and the strength to create the necessary torque.

I think there is a difference between fully formed tools (like a screwdriver or a program or whatever) and objects that get tool-like usage in a specific case. Sometimes these objects are still proto-tools, tools on their way of solidifying, experiments that try o settle on a model and a solution of the problem. Think a screwdriver where the handle is too narrow so you can’t grab it properly. Other objects are “makeshifts”, objects that could sometimes be used for something but that usage is not intended, not obvious. That’s me using a folding ruler to open a beer bottle (or another drink with a similar cap, but I learned it with beer).

Tools are not just “things you can use in a way”, they are objects that have been designed with great intent for a set of specific problems, objects that through their design make their intended usage obvious and clear (specialized tools might require you to have a set of domain knowledge to have that clarity). In a way tools are a way to transfer knowledge: Knowledge about the problem and the solutions are embedded in the tool through the design of it. Sure I could tell you that you can easily tighten a screw my applying the right torque to it, but that leaves you figuring out how to get that done. The tool contains that. Tools also often explicitly exclude other solutions. They are opinionated (more or less of course).

In the Python community there is a saying: “There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it.” This is what I mean. The better the tool, the clearer it’s guiding you towards a best practice solution. Which leads me to thinking about “AI”.

When I say “AI” here I am not talking about specialized machine learning models that are intended for a very specific case. Think a visual model that only detects faces in a video feed. I am thinking about “AI” as it is pushed into the market by OpenAI, Anthropic etc.: “AI” is this one solution to everything (eventually).

And here the tool idea falls apart: ChatGPT isn’t designed for anything. Or as Stephen Farrugia argues in this video: AI is presented as a Swiss army knife, “as something tech loves to compare its products to, is something that might be useful in some situations.“

This is not a tool. This is not a well-designed artifact that tries to communicate you clear solutions to your actual problems and how to implement them. It’s a playground, a junk shop where you might eventually find something interesting. It’s way less a way to solve problems than a way to keep busy feeling like you are working on a problem while doing something else.

Again, there are neural networks and models that clearly fit into my definition of a tool. But here we are at the distinction of machine learning an “AI” again: Machine learning is written in Python, AI is written in LinkedIn posts and Powerpoint presentations.

Tool making is a social activity. Tools often do not emerge fully formed but go through iterations withing a community, take their final shape through the use by a community of practitioners and their feedback. All tools we use today are deeply social, historical objects that have embedded the knowledge and experiences of hundreds or thousands of people in order to create “progress”, to formalize certain solutions so we can spend our brain capacity on figuring out the next thing or to just create something beautiful or fun. Our predecessors have suffered through proto-tools and all the hurt that comes from using them so we wouldn’t have to. And this social, temporal context is all part of a tool.

And the big “AI” systems that supposedly are “just tools” now do not have any of that. They are a new thing but for most problems they hope that you find ways of using them. They do in a way take away hundreds of years of social learning and experience and leave you alone in front of an empty prompt field.

So no, I do not think that the “AI” systems that big tech wants us to use (and rent from them) are tools. They are makeshifts at best.