mikeleonardvisualarts has added a photo to the pool:
Alright, friends, in honor of attending the (alleged) last-ever Wu-Tang show at Madison Square Garden, I thought it appropriate to tell the story of the time I got to see the greatest, most hype, most chaotic energy hip hop show that I've ever seen, or that I ever will see: the last time all nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan appeared together on one stage together.
At that point in my career, I was working at a small company that did online music promo, and we were lucky enough to work with Loud Records, which was releasing The W, the third full album by the group. The internet was not yet central to album launches at that point (Napster had just come out the year prior, and this was still the period when the major labels were convinced that the Internet was the devil) so we'd only been involved in the periphery of some of the lead-up work. GZA had come by our offices a couple days earlier to record some promo voiceovers and brought his kid along (if I'm helping the Genius' kid with math homework, does that make me a genius also by the transitive property? I think so.) and I figured that was as exciting as things could possibly get around this album rollout.
Then we got invited to the album release concert.
The show was high-energy from the start, opening with crowd-pleasers like Protect Ya Neck to take folks back to where it all began. But this was also sort of what you'd expect from an album release party, with three or four tracks in a row from the new record right after that. I wasn't yet super familiar with the new songs, so I was more watching the crowd, and the thing I remember most was that there were a ton of dudes milling about on stage, and the crowd was incredibly hyped up considering that they had rapped every word of the first song along with the guys on stage, but didn't yet know the new ones the same way.
The vibes around the record release overall had been a bit fraught. In the prior years, all of the members of the Wu had put out their solo records, which were usually excellent, but that made people wonder if the group was ever going to get back together at all. And then just in the months before the album release, O.D.B. had gotten arrested and his only contributions on the album had been made by recording his vocals over the phone from prison. At the time of the performance, he had been on the run, having left a mandatory rehab stint in California with his whereabouts unknown. Only the other eight members of the group were onstage, along with whatever hangers-on they had invited to come up with them. (I remember Redman dropping in to do Da Rockwilder with Meth, too, because I still love that song.)
But being up in the balcony (RZA said it was only industry types sitting up where we were), it was hard to make out exactly who all was on stage; what I remember was that nearly every dude on stage was wearing all black. Except after a couple of songs, I noticed that one guy was in a BRIGHT ORANGE parka. After that initial set of songs from the new album, RZA had started hyping up the crowd a bit while the orange parka dude started moving to the front of the stage.
And then, the piano part from the beginning of Shimmy Shimmy Ya started up. The reaction was, to this day, the most insane, explosive, hyped-up response from a crowd I've ever seen at any hip hop show, ever. Everybody in the building lost their goddamn minds. Old Dirty Bastard, on the run from the law, had shown up on stage. All nine members of the Wu were in the building.
The only record of the moment I've ever found is this potato-quality recording of the show, which doesn't nearly do justice to the feeling or the emotion in the room, but it was as ecstatic a collective expression from a crowd as I've ever felt — and not just during a live music performance. Even 25 years later, I can remember getting shivers from that moment, which is even more striking given how ridiculous and over-the-top O.D.B.'s lyrics and onstage persona were in the moment.
O.D.B. stuck around just long enough for the guys to start Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta Fuck Wit, but word pretty quickly got out that he was at the show, and during the set he slipped offstage and was back on the run. By the time the group closed the show with Gravel Pit (which was the brand new single at the time), he was long gone. Being up in the balcony, we saw the cops come in and run through a few times during the rest of the set, and there were all kinds of rumors flying about where he was headed, or whether he was going to pop up again, but O.D.B. was gone for good.
A week later, still on the run, O.D.B. was arrested in Philadelphia. Four years later, he was gone for good. As I'd noted on the night of the show, I knew it was the last time we'd see all nine members onstage together.
Still, I'm excited to see them close a chapter tonight, as the greatest hip hop supergroup of all time. I didn't think I'd ever get to see them again, and 25 years goes by a lot faster than you'd imagine!
After nine years, most recently at Fastly and before that at Glitch (and Fog Creek), I am very soon (finally!) going to be taking some time off from working to catch my breath and clear my mind and focus on the new Mario Kart. And, you know, spend time my family and friends and all that good stuff.
If you've read these kinds of posts before, generally this is where people talk about how they're going to rest and recharge, and I'll certainly be doing some of that. But I wanted to use the opportunity to connect with my community and ask an important question: How can I be of service? What's the most important work to focus on next?
Over the years, I've been lucky enough to get to work with some of the most talented people at the highest levels in the worlds of technology, policy and governance, and media and entertainment and culture. I'm particularly obsessed with how these systems interact, and these days, with the breakdowns that have happened between these ecosystems, it feels like there's a huge opportunity in building new, positive systems to replace what's been broken.
What's out there
In my tech career, things have changed immensely. People seem to have forgotten to check whether the tech they’re talking about can actually do what people are saying it's designed to do. They’ve confused a financier who cuts checks to arms dealers with a technologist who actually invents new things. They’ve overlooked the innovation that’s happening on open platforms, in open communities, in human-scale spaces or in non-extractive models.
As a creator and a person who loves media and culture, I see huge potential in writers and coders and artists and musicians and video makers seizing even more of the power of owning their own work, and connecting directly with their own communities. It’s easy to imagine newer models evolving, of the power balance shifting again, and entire new platforms and industries arising from a generation of fans who’ve grown up fighting for the artists they care about.
In the world of policy and power, we’ve seen a collapse of the hard laws and soft norms that were holding everything together — in no small part due to tech tycoons working to dismantle social infrastructure and civil society. No one knows if America will recover from an authoritarian push that’s already got troops marching in the streets, but I know the power lies with the people. I have seen these battles fought and won, in our own history, in my own communities. And am galvanized to be part of helping to organize whatever is next, to shift power to those who would use it to protect and uplift others.
Every meaningful thing I’ve done in my career has been in community with all of the smart and generous people who I’m fortunate to have around me. I expect the same will be true again. I'd love to hear from friends, and those whom I haven't met yet, about what problems need to be solved.
The next thing to make
Is it building new tech that focuses on the areas the current industry is missing? Empowering creators in ways that today’s platforms too often overlook? Figuring out how we navigate the world of policy and power when the authoritarian impulse is dismantling civic infrastructure all around us?
Many folks have said I should get back to writing more (or to revive my old podcast!) or maybe get my ideas out there in a more accessible format. I’ve deeply enjoyed getting to focus on governance and accountability at the board level for the organizations that I serve. And then there’s always the purpose and joy that comes from building community.
I’m genuinely open to whatever is next in a way that I haven’t felt since possibly the start of my career. And I’m looking forward to connecting or reconnecting with all of you to hear your advice, requests, hopes or wild-eyed suggestions about some interesting things we could conspire on in the future.
So, I’m taking requests. I’ll be recharging for a while, and then back more motivated than ever. And when I’m back, what work will we do?
I don't think I've ever felt more tension in the room during a live performance than when I was standing five feet in front of Sly Stone, in a room that felt like a powder keg ready to blow. And I don't think I've ever seen a room feel greater relief than watching him tear into "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" and feeling the frustration, anger, and resentment of everyone around him melt away from the sheer force of the joy and pure undeniable propulsive funk of that song. There's no wonder why it's one of my favorite songs of all time. And there's no better example of the power of Sly's gift.
There aren't many of us who are still young enough to have our hearing who can tell a story about seeing Sly Stone perform live; I'm lucky to be one of those few, despite the fact that I saw Sly play well into the era when he was notorious for showing up late and flaking out early. Just that evening, he'd shuffled off stage mid-set at an earlier performance, leaving a disgruntled crowd warning us not to expect too much from the show we were about to see.
By the time I'd parked in front of the stage, I got to watch the band come out and start vamping on their first song, drawing out the instrumentals and very obviously looking around to see if Sly was going to come out to join them. They began singing parts of the set without him, visibly frustrated and unsure whether he’d show up at all. The tension built over an almost-unbearable 15 minutes — and that was after the show had started almost 90 minutes late. By the second song of the set, those of us up front could see Sly just offstage waiting in the wings, bowed over in a way that suggested he was probably a little too frail, a little too... something to put on a show that night.
They stretched out the first two songs as long as they could, and it was easily the angriest, most anxious on-stage presence I've ever seen at a live show. It felt like the band was ready to go over and kill Sly if he didn't come out immediately. They began "If You Want Me To Stay", one of my favorites in the entire Family Stone catalog. And Sly stepped out.
After a few hesitant notes, he was instantly in full voice. It was like a switch had been flipped on. They moved into "Thank You", and Sly nailed every note. I locked eyes with him during the song — I was close enough to be able to see his eyes through his shades thanks to the bright stage lights — and he looked as alive, as thankful as a man half his age. the reports from that night capture the energy.
Thankful and Thoughtful
"Thank You" is a song that's somewhat central to my entire understanding of popular music. Being born well after the song was released, my entry point to the track was its sampling in Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation". That song's evolution from anthem into a bittersweet reference point for Janet's own complex reckoning with the legacy of its message felt like a perfect reflection of Sly's own legacy.
In the year @JanetJackson finally will take her overdue place in the @rockhall an interesting perspective and good read from @anildash after the #RhythmNation #JanetJackson #JimmyJam #TerryLewis https://t.co/eU5OpzQGGK
— Jimmy Jam (@flytetymejam) January 3, 2019
As I got to talk about with Jimmy Jam (who's casual overhearing of "Thank You" at a restaurant prompted its inclusion in "Rhythm Nation") recently, Sly was both that person who could tell everyone to "Dance to the Music" and that person who could answer Marvin's plaintive question of "What's Goin' On?" with the simple, and accurate, statement that "There's A Riot Goin' On". And "Riot" is an album that ends by revisiting this very song, this time with a churning groove that swaps the high-energy funk for deep, rumbling blues. Just as Janet answered "Rhythm Nation" with "Shoulda Known Better", and Sly answered Marvin, here Sly answers himself by thanking Africa.
But in every case, this is the thing Sly did — transforming the energy around him into its mirror, showing us how closely the best of us lives adjacent to the worst of us. So much of the narrative in the decades since his greatest triumphs in popular culture have framed Sly as having been "consumed by his demons" or other such clichés. This is why I was so grateful that I got to watch a few brilliant folks fight and sweat for years to bring together Sly Lives! and not just do justice to the power and impact of Sly's legacy, but to have done so while he was hear to see it.
Because what Sly could always do, with his music, and with his mere presence, was what he did that night when I watched him on stage. He took every bit of the anger and resentment and uncertainty in that room, even the frustration from his own family members standing beside him on that stage, and channeled the simmering tension that had been threatening to boil over.
And Sly instantly turned that flash point into something transcendent. Something lasting. Then he said thank you.
In Time
I can't measure the impact that Sly has had the way I see the world. I can't even count just the number of Sly songs that I had the good fortune to hear Prince play live. The very first thing I ever wrote for this blog, towards the end of the last century, was about seeing a Prince aftershow — with half of the Family Stone in the band, and how I got to meet the horn players backstage after the show. Most of my life has happened since that night, and yet I still remember feeling like a door had opened to something new. Maybe it had.
It's hard to explain what Sly Stone was in a contemporary context. We have witnessed the ascendence and current dominance of a decades-long effort to dismantle the vision of racial and gender harmony that Sly invented and advanced in popular culture. But they only fought back against because he kicked that door open almost single-handedly. It's impossible to explain to today's world that there wasn't music made with drum machines on the radio before Sly. But we all dance to a soundtrack descended from his beats. He said to dance to the music, and we do. For all his flaws and foibles, this was a brave man. He changed things. There is a riot going on. Every single one of the greatest artists of the decades since simply could not have done what they did if Sly had not done what he had done. Que sera, sera.
And that man was funky.
Every few months, we see someone in culture who unabashedly talks about not washing well, whether it's a celebrity discussing their griminess, or a random person on social media who inadvertently reveals their poor ablutionary proclivities. Sometimes it’s about their own hygiene, how they don’t wash their hands, or maybe their legs or feet. Sometimes it’s about how they let their children be dirty. Occasionally it’s a social media influencer with an entire theory around cleanliness that doesn’t involve, you know, actually taking baths or showers. They've got it all figured out.
It happens so frequently that I have started writing this piece regularly for years, but always hold off on actually publishing it — because it’s so incessant that I never want to seem like I'm talking about the latest instance of Dirty Person Revealed. And every time, the conversation goes the same way, with the same unproductive result. Those of us in communities that have historically been marginalized are aghast at the profound lack of hygiene that these folks are practicing, and just as put off by the fact that they brag about it. That’s usually followed by us talking about how our mothers would never let us be unclean, and certainly wouldn’t let us tell strangers about it if we were.
What Clean Means
But there’s something deeper happening here. First, I honestly am not that troubled by the fact that social norms differ around people's daily rituals for hygiene. I’ve known folks who were on lengthy hikes or travel excursions where they didn’t bathe for weeks because they simply couldn’t, or it wasn't practical. Similarly, I’ve known people who grew up without water security, and as a result had wildly different expectations about access to, and use of, clean water. I certainly don't judge people without access. And, in most of those cases, they still found ways to stay as clean as they could within their context; there are usually lots of folk traditions that enable surprisingly effective methods of hygiene even if the methods are unfamiliar in a lot of contemporary contexts.
Beyond that, I’m not even really troubled by clichéd stories of how the French bathe less, or that there were cultures where people wore cologne or perfume instead of washing. It is not surprising that different cultures would have different standards around these things. The more significant question is: Who gets to be unclean?
For those of us in marginalized communities, especially people of color in the west, one of the very first descriptors used by white supremacists when they want to demean or dismiss us is to describe us as “dirty”. Within South Asian communities, despite the reality that there are extensive, and culturally impactful, norms around ritualized cleansing and washing, white supremacists will very often have their very tactic be talking about how we smell or are dirty when justifying their attacks or violence against us. This, despite the existence of entire revolting communities of manosphere dudes telling on themselves about how their insecurities are keeping them from properly washing.
By contrast, dominant cultures see their performance of dirtiness as “real” or even “pure”. Hippies on a commune, or fans at a festival, or mountain men being out in the wilderness together while bragging about how filthy they are, are seen as being closer to the earth, or more in touch with nature. A lack of cleanliness signifies authenticity and connectedness. These days, when celebs talk about their unwillingness to wash their hands, they evoke themes of pseudo-science and conspiracism that also fuel the dangerous anti-vax movement, by presenting lack of personal care or health maintenance as some virtuous abstention. Unwashed hands sit beside unpasteurized milk and uninspected meats.
Our communities, by contrast, have entire complex social traditions around staying clean. The endless washcloth conversations on Twitter (back when it was still Twitter), accompanied by the discourse around staying moisturized, along with mentions of how often people would change clothes, or even recitations of elaborate relaxing bath rituals — all of these reify the importance of staying clean in so many of our communities, both as assertions of our norms, but also in anticipatory response to the lies of white supremacy. We're steeling ourselves for the very first insult so often being to call us dirty or smelly, the lie be damned.
But let me tell you, there is joy in being clean! There was a flash of recognition for me, seeing the common threads between our communities, when I heard Patti LaBelle talking about hanging out with Prince back in the 90s.
"He had changed his clothes again. He changes his clothes six times a day! I'm not lying. And every time he's clean — cleaner than the last time. With his pumps to match. I said, 'God, I'm scared of you!'"
Patti means clean both literally and figuratively, and it spoke to me.
So, the discussions that pop up regularly, in media and in conversation, about people’s bathing rituals are really about who gets to be “clean”. It’s a visceral, personal concern for so many of us, and the casual privilege of those who get to flaunt their dirtiness is a stark reminder of how dehumanizing narratives are always built on lies.
The next time everyone is pretending to be shocked about who doesn't use soap and who doesn't wash their feet, you can just opt out of the cycle; we know what we're really talking about here. And we can wash our hands of the whole conversation.
Click “I agree” to continue.
You didn’t click it, though. Or maybe you did? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.
The concept of consent doesn’t exist on the modern internet. You didn’t read the terms of service. You didn’t agree to accept cookies. I didn’t consent to having my site pulled into the training model for that artificial intelligence system that’s going to use to sell the fruit of my labor for profit. I didn’t agree to have my activity tracked across all these different websites and cobbled together into a creepy and inaccurate profile of my preferences that gets sold without my permission. Nobody asks for anything, they just take it. There’s not even an acknowledgement, that any of this stuff is happening let alone a conversation about it.
Meanwhile, we’ve been telling our kids that the standard for decent people is enthusiastic consent. That’s very evidently not the case for the tycoons running the technology industry.
The Internet of Creeps
At the beginning of the web, people used to get together and create informal standards for how to describe what you would allow people to do to your website, or to your content on the internet. It was so broadly understood that you would respect the visitors to your site that you didn’t even have to ask their permission, because there would be a massive user uproar if you were to do something so hostile as to surveil them or track them. You treated visitors to your website with the same respect that a restauranteur would treat patrons who had sat down to eat a meal; it would be exceedingly weird and creepy if you were to film them eating, or if you wrote down every word they said to each other and sold them to a stranger, or if you sniffed them while they ate and then said “I think I can guess what brand of perfume you’re wearing, can I order some more of it for you?”
Obviously, gradually the standards shifted and all of the major websites became creeps who sniff their patrons. First, it was tracking what you clicked on, and what you searched for. Later, it was what search terms brought you to the website. There was a huge fight in the late 90s about the technology that Google later acquired, which allowed for tracking users across different websites, with activists (correctly!) saying it would allow for unprecedented spying on users, and open up individuals to tracking by entities like governments, both foreign and domestic. Between the Snowden revelations and platforms like Facebook rapidly expanding to unimaginable levels of global surveillance of billions of users, the reality turned out to be far, far worse than even the worst-case scenarios that those 90s-era activists had warned about.
It’s Worse Than You Think
Now, people don’t even really understand the degree to which things are happening without their consent online. Have you ever gone to type a message in a comment box on social media, or began entering a search term online, and then thought the better of it and deleted it without actually submitting the form? Did you know that those sites used the words you typed anyway and incorporated them into their profile of your interests and preferences?
What about every site that you’ve signed up for in the past, when you did check that “I agree” box when you were creating your account — did you read the whole terms of service? I didn’t think so. Well, I’ve not only read the terms of service, I’ve written more of those TOS than I care to recall, and the wild thing about them is that generally, they all say “we can change this any time we want”. Thirteen years ago I wrote a column in Wired about how Facebook was unilaterally changing its TOS while offering no recourse to its users. Just in the first five years alone of Facebook’s existence, they modified their privacy settings countless times to shift nearly all content from being virtually completely within your circle of friends to completely visible to the entire internet, without ever asking for user consent for any of the changes.
Creators and artists have always been the community most at risk for tech companies to make choices about their work without their consent. When Napster launched at the end of the last century, musicians' work was shared without their consent, and the debate was framed as being about software innovation vs. record labels, instead of centering artists and their rights, since it was easy for fans to hate labels. When YouTube launched 20 years ago and countless videos were uploaded without the permission of their creators, it again got framed as a battle between big media companies and upstart tech platforms, with the same tactic of focusing on user convenience to distract from the issue of creators' consent.
We're seeing the same playbook being used again, but this time many regular consumers are not falling for the AI companies disregarding creators' right to consent in how their work is used. While extremists behind some of the AI platforms (and their corrupt cronies in positions of political power) are even willing to destroy the entire copyright system to enable this heist, it's an interesting evolution of culture that fans have aligned to stand behind the artists they love.
Consent Culture Comes Online
I'm not surprised to see the expectations shifting around consent online. We've seen a generation grow up with expectations that they should have control over what happens to them, and that they should have agency over their work and their lives. They're extremely fluent in the impacts of the digital platforms that they use every day, and even if people don't explicitly think about digital experiences in terms of consent, they intuitively understand when it's missing. The growing frustration around "enshittification" is, in no small part, grounded in a huge frustration around having a constant feeling of being forced to use features and tools that don't respect our choices. We're constantly wrestling with platforms that don't respect our boundaries. And we have an uncanny sense that the giant tech companies are going behind our backs and into our lives in ways that we don't know about and certainly wouldn't agree to if we did.
As I've been spending time building tools to help people fight back, like giving creators tools to protect their sites or apps or content from AI bots, or teaching people how to lock down their personal profiles online, I'm finding a lot of enthusiasm, even from people who don't see themselves as being very technical, in taking control of their digital lives. There's a common thread that ties together concerns about privacy, security, even just basic usability for so many of the tech products we use today. It just boils down to whether the people who make the technology that we use believe that we should be in control. It's simple: Technology should only ever do exactly what we have explicitly given it our consent to do. The institutions that don't understand that basic principle need to start paying a heavy cost for their transgressions.
It's hard for me to articulate just how much I love "Andor", the best Star Wars entertainment of at least this century, and maybe ever. Tony Gilroy's long been a favorite of mine (friends will know that I need very little prompting to wax rhapsodic about Michael Clayton, his greatest film) so it was no surprise that I would be inclined to like the show. But when it turned out to be a deeply ruminative, unabashedly anti-fascist show with lavish production design and a recurring fixation on supply chains, it's like it was crafted specifically to appeal to me personally.
There are lots of analyses of the show online, some fairly sophisticated, but too many suffer from being fairly facile as online fandoms have been trained to pursue "find the reference to the wiki lore!" rituals, and so they struggle to deal with a thematically rich work that is plainly indifferent to fan service. It also emphasizes just how unlikely it is that this series exists at all, striking such a different tone from anything else in the franchise, being given such an extravagant budget, and being allowed to challenge its audience in a way that no major studio has ever allowed a top-tier blockbuster cinematic universe to do.
If there's one thing Star Wars fans love, it's hating Star Wars, and so the only way we can ever truly praise a Star Wars work is by implicitly insulting all of them, usually in one of these two ways: This is Star Wars for adults! This is Star Wars for people who don't like Star Wars! Sure, it's those things, and it's genuinely good prestige TV (I say that as someone who generally despises prestige TV), but it's also good Star Wars) and I am not a person prone to "guilty pleasures"; I find no shame in enjoying a franchise that is enormously popular and that's been a fun form of entertainment in movies and shows and video games and toys since I was a kid.
Wither DVD Extras
But what has been a wonderful surprise is discovering that so many of the brilliantly talented artists behind "Andor" have participated in deep, thoughtful conversations about their work on the show. They've gone into deep detail about their artistic choices, and even discussed the directions that they weren't able to explore. On these kinds of streaming shows, there are always plenty of interviews with the cast that take the form of a typical press junket, and "Andor" has those, but they take the typical conventional form, and are not particularly interesting even though the actors are brilliant.
Fortunately, though, there are also a rich set of interviews with the creators responsible for aspects of production like the sound design, stunt choreography, set decoration, and writing — even Tony Gilroy himself talking about the combinations of writing and showrunning of the series. It is just an extraordinary glimpse at what it took to make the work. I grew up watching the "behind the scenes" documentaries that a generation of us pored over in the 80s and 90s as Star Wars fans before the DVD era. We felt like we'd won the lottery when DVDs arrived and suddenly studios felt like they had to expand their releases with an accompaniment of bonus material to entice fans to buy a copy of their favorite films. In the era before fan wikis and online fan culture in general, this was the only peek at how people made the creative work we were inspired by, in the same way that we would obsess over the liner notes on a favorite album.
Now it's as easy as a few clicks, and it is no surprise that the people who made "Andor" are also wonderfully articulate about how and why they made their choices while creating the series. If you enjoyed the show as much as I did, set aside some time and listen to how people who are operating at the very top of their game can make something amazing that reinvents a familiar universe after almost half a century.
(Spoilers) Creator Interview Videos
Tony Gilroy recaps the writing and structure of season two (and the overall story) of Andor.
The stunt coordinator and stunt doubles of Andor walk through the brutal climactic fistfight from the end of season two.
The cinematographer, production designer, and costume designer of Andor discuss season one of the show. (It's a long interview, here's a brief excerpt about the minimalist design in the show.) This is another good audio-only interview with Luke Hull and Michael Wilkinson, the production designer and costume designer.
The sound designer/sound editor and dialogue/ADR supervisor of Andor explain the sound design of season two.
The set decorator of Andor discusses the set decor of season one.
Over the last few months, all the nerds have gotten excited about Model Context Protocol, or MCP. It's a spec that was designed by Anthropic (the Claude folks) last year to let their LLM know how to ask various apps for information or be able to interact with different systems. Then, a couple months ago, OpenAI decided to support the same protocol in ChatGPT, and voila! Now it's a standard that everybody has adopted. It's even in Windows, the official operating system of the late 20th century.
The interesting thing about the rapid adoption of MCP isn't the specification itself. Honestly, the spec is... kinda mid. Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes who were never in danger of being gruntled in the first place, they would be scratched out in plain text, with the occasional shouting in ALL CAPS about what we SHOULD and MUST do. MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~. But MCP works! And it's open — and that's what counts.
The Real, Open Web
In the real world, on the real web, slightly under-specified protocols that quickly get adopted by all the players in a space are what wins; it's how we got to the beautiful, radical magic of things like "wherever you get your podcasts". This is why the rapid adoption of MCP represents something of a second coming of the ethos of Web 2.0. Maybe we can call it Web 2.0 2.0.
It is important to understand that the current usage of "Web 2.0" is often wrong; people often use Web 2.0 as a term to describe things like Facebook. This is incorrect — closed, proprietary, user-hostile sites like Facebook are what killed Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 community was a bunch of folks building lots of different sites that were meant to have open APIs that let developers (and even users!) explore and connect people and data together in interesting and unexpected and useful and even weird ways. The standard-bearers of the era were sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us and Upcoming, which pioneered things like tags and social sharing. (I got a front row seat to a lot of the open standards work around APIs and protocols through working with the teams that built platforms like LiveJournal and Movable Type, which helped invent a lot of that stuff, too.)
The shared values of the Web 2.0 community was that you built your tools, technology, and platforms around open data and open protocols, with the expectation that users would be in control and that developers would have consistent, interoperable tools for interacting with these systems. At a practical level, this meant that I spent countless hours in meetings or in email conversations with people who were ostensibly my competitors, working through the technical details of how to make sure the products my team was building worked in the same ways that our competitors' did when developers were trying to write code to control them. We were all constantly writing specifications and documentation and sample code to describe how it all worked, and then writing big long blog posts fighting about how it should work.
Bringing Open Back
It's been a full generation since there was an expectation of interoperability between different apps and platforms that developers were using. While we had been so hopeful, the big VCs and tech industry leaders who are in charge now conspired to kill off that era of openness. For example. years ago, I'd helped build a tool that let you analyze your activity on social networks, and the people in charge of the platforms at the big social networks (some of whom are the same folks who are running the platforms at the big AI companies today!) made the decision to shut off the APIs that our product, and our users, relied upon. It killed our service, and our company. The Facebooks and Twitters of the world killed the Web 2.0 dream of open data and interoperable technologies for lots of people, and users lost out. All kinds of stupid situations became routine, like not being able to see an embedded Instagram photo on a Twitter timeline, let alone being able to do powerful things that people on the fediverse or Bluesky take for granted, like being able to import or export your followers, or being able to control your network with whatever app you want.
The rise of MCP gives hope that the popularity of AI amongst coders might pry open all these other platforms to make them programmable for any purpose, not just so that LLMs can control them.
It's cool that other platforms adopted the same spec that Anthropic made for their system. There's a generosity of spirit to a technology platform choosing to be the second to adopt a protocol, if they do it in a faithful fashion. The temptation is to embrace and extend (and eventually, extinguish) the platform that you're copying the protocol from. But if, instead, you act in good faith to say "we're going to make it easier for everybody, simply by using the same interface that this other company did, in hopes of making the whole ecosystem work a little bit better". Well, that's when the magic can happen.
This challenge of just supporting the standard thing is harder than it seems. A while back, when we launched a semantic caching product for popular AI platforms, one of the hardest things to convince our super genius developers to do was to just... use the regular ChatGPT API. "But we can make it better!" they'll say. Developers always say that. But better is worse. Anything that's different is worse. Stop being smarter and more clever, and stop cleaning up that horrible spec that is riddled with inconsistencies, and just ship the same shit as everybody else. You know what was a garbage spec that was missing all kinds of stuff? HTML! And yet here we are, on the wonderful world wide web. The whole internet sits atop a bunch of terrible specs. Jon Postel smiles upon us all.
Demand Conformance
Now that a new generation of developers has had a taste of the wonderful explosion in creativity and possibility that comes from all their favorite tools and platforms using the same protocols and formats, they're going to get hooked on it. It's another one of the reasons that I've been feeling kind of like we're getting 2004 vibes again, mostly in a good way.
I was lucky enough to have that experience in the early days of the social web and during the rise of Web 2.0, between the ascendance of RSS and podcasting, and open formats like OpenID and OAuth and the attempts at creating OpenSocial, which bore fruit many years later as fediverse and ActivityPub. There were countless other efforts that were less successful, or that were more prosaic or that only mattered for things like appeasing Google, but some of them... actually put power in people's hands. Once you've seen it happen, you kind of get hooked on it. You realize that technology, and the Internet, were not actually meant to exclusively be the playthings of a few giant companies, and a few depraved billionaire tycoons.
Developers, coders, nerds, even regular users — we have power. We can demand that the platforms we use give us access to control our experiences using code. We should go even further, and push for transparency about what these platforms are doing when we access them using open standards like MCP. As flexible as the Model Context Protocol is, it's still a totally opaque system when it comes to what a platform is doing with your data, or what actions might happen when you interact via MCP. The security risks are enormously high, and the protocol does little more than hand-wave at those concerns, suggesting that implementers ought to buckle their seatbelts because the vehicle might explode later on. If history is any indication, that stuff won't get fixed until there are some really egregious violations that get a ton of bad press.
Maybe Could Prosper
I'm not a total Pollyanna about the return of Web 2.0-style openness. MCP is not a panacea that's going to fix everything that's wrong about the developer ecosystem. And it certainly doesn't fix all the bullshit and hype that's distorting the conversation around AI, or provide the better criticism about AI that's sorely lacking in cultural discourse right now.
There is a chance, though, that younger developers, and those who weren't around to build back during that last era a generation ago, are going to get inspired by MCP to push for the web to go back towards its natural architecture. It was never meant to be proprietary. It was never meant to be controlled by a handful of dudes at a tiny number of giant companies. It was always meant to be programmable through janky specs that everybody hurriedly adopted just for the sheer joy of something fun to hack on. That was true long before the web had any version numbers at all.
We're a few years into the tech industry's AI hype cycle, and it's all been characterized by far more heat than light. The assertions by the people making the AI platforms are as absurd as we've come to expect from shameless Silicon Valley shills. (AGI: a strategy of raising funding based on the promise of being able to replace any worker with a Python script.)
Interestingly enough, while there are tons of valid critiques of today's AI offerings, we don't often see an affirmative example of what we would want to see. So, I'd like to share an example that's been banging around in my head for a while of what a good AI platform might look like. Some of this is just a thought exercise, trying to imagine an alternate future. But this is also an intentional, practical strategy and an attempt at a more effective form of critique — because if we are going to have better AI in the future, we are going to have get lots of people to understand that such a thing is possible.
The Good AI?
This isn't a comprehensive list, but it's possible to imagine some traits of an AI system that could credibly offer an alternative to the offerings that are currently dominating the conversation. (This is deliberately light on technical specifics and is intended for a more general audience, but is grounded in familiarity with the current state of progress on consumer-grade AI technologies.) Here are some highlights:
- Content consent: A model trained on a data set gathered with consent, from creators or content owners who have agreed to allow their work or intellectual property to be indexed, and with revenues (if any) shared back to those creators if those are the agreed terms.
- Hallucination-free: Alternative approaches, possibly other than a large language model entirely, which avoid the confabulation issues generally described as "hallucination" in current systems, or which clearly label content likely to be spurious.
- Green: Clarity on sustainability and energy consumption for both training and usage of new offerings, reflecting the vast improvements in efficiency that have been achieved by recent models, and encouraging and rewarding the use of lower-impact, more conventional approaches (like traditional search!) where appropriate.
- Actually open source: The Open Source Initiative has offered us a clear definition of open source AI, which doesn't settle for the mere "open weights" that industry titans are trying to pass off as "open", and offers real transparency for developers and institutions, which would unlock a new era of innovation and accountability. Developers are ready to get their hands on these kinds of tools.
- Community-led: Alternative creation, ownership and governance models for AI tools that address the corporate chaos of today's big names are well past due. Whether it takes the form of a workers' cooperative, an open source collective, stewardship by an academic or NGO, or some other simple format for sharing the work and the tech, both users and the industry are ready for other players to change the power dynamic around AI tech. There's even the potential for a platform that is creator-led or owned and controlled by those who contributed to its creation, aligning the motivations of the platform with those who make its existence possible.
- Accessible: These are tools that should be available to all. Whether that means across devices, across continents, across abilities, across platforms, or even simply across a longer span of time and attention than "until the VC money runs out", there's a huge opportunity in making tools that serve everyone.
As mentioned, these are highlights. We can imagine a lot more details, and there are probably additional ambitions that we might want to capture. But this kind of reframing of the AI space would be akin to what has happened in other fundamental enabling technologies ranging from operating systems to web servers to countless systems at the protocol or infrastructure level. Tech at those layers gets more open, more collaborative, and more empowering for more organizations while reducing the amount of institutional control. We even see those patterns repeat in cultural phenomena like "wherever you get your podcasts".
We simply need to start thinking through the implications of a fundamentally better approach to AI, and to understand that all of these things are extremely possible. Consumer-grade AI tools that are actually good do not have to be a hallucination.
The latest fad amongst tech CEOs is no longer "founder mode", or taking drugs that they would fire you for taking, or telling everybody to return to the office — it's demanding that all work be AI-first! This is a great idea if you think nobody at your company is great at what they do. It may otherwise be a suboptimal strategy. Let's dive in!
Let's use me as a case study. I'm pretty okay at writing. For example, one time I wrote a fairly technical analysis of Twitter's platform strategy that inspired Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas to start Twitter beef with me two years later when he read the post and took offense to my referring to him as "nobody’s favorite rapper".
This is something your GPTs cannot do, I assure you. An average LLM won't even know that Drake's favorite MIME type is application/pdf. Chalk one up for the greatness of human creativity.
The AI-First Mind Virus
Shopify's CEO Tobi Lütke (personal motto: "what if a Canadian was all the worst things about the United States?") started the "AI-first" trend, with one of those big memos that included, amongst other things, the declaration that "We will add Al usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire." This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. Isn't that interesting?
Some of the other CEOs talking about the use of AI are a little more reasonable. Duolingo's CEO Luis von Ahn seems to be trying to be somewhat more moderate in his memo, stating plainly that he doesn't see AI replacing his employees. (Though that does immediately raise the "who brought that up?" question...) Yet even in this more even-handed take, we still get the insistence that "Al use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews". This is really weird!
The funny thing is, I'm not saying LLMs are without their uses. Let's use me as a case study again. I'm a lousy coder, these days. I haven't had time to keep up my skills, and the area I focused on for most of my dev career (front end web development) changes particularly quickly. So I use some of the modern tools to help me get up to speed and get more done in a limited amount of time, because otherwise I'm woefully unproductive in the short windows I have to code in my free time.
To be explicit: I code on the weekends, not professionally. That means I'm not very good at it. I'm certainly nothing like the incredibly talented developers that I've had the good fortune to work with over the years. I'm just fluent enough to be able to debug the broken code that LLMs generate, or to catch the bugs that they spew out by default. And I'm sure I don't even catch all the bugs that pop up, but fortunately, I'm not making any production systems; I'm just building little toy apps and sites for myself.
This is an important illustration: AI is really good for helping you if you're bad at something, or at least below average. But it's probably not the right tool if you're great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do they think their employees are all bad at their jobs?
Groupthink and signaling
Big tech CEOs and VCs really love performing for each other. We know they hang out in group chats like high schoolers, preening and sending each other texts, each trying to make sure they're all wearing the latest fashions, whether it's a gold chain or a MAGA hat or just repeating a phrase that they heard from another founder. A key way of showing that they're part of this cohort is to make sure they're having a tantrum and acting out against their workers fairly regularly.
The return to office fad was a big part of this effort, often largely motivated by reacting to the show of worker power in the racial justice activism efforts of 2020. Similarly, being AI-first shows that a company is participating in the AI trend in the "right" way, by imposing it on workers, rather than trusting workers to judge what tools are useful for them to do their jobs.
A more normal policy on AI at a company might be something like this:
Our IT department has evaluated a set of LLM tools and determined that these ones meet our requirements for security, performance, data governance, reliability, manageability and integration with our workflows. We'll be doing a controlled deployment of these tools and you can choose to use them if you think they'll help you with your work; please share your feedback on whether they are helpful, and what might make them more useful for you over time. Here are the ways these AI tools meet our corporate standards for compliance with intellectual property consent, sustainability and environmental goals, and accessibility.
This would not get you invited to the fascist VC group chat, tho!
AI-Second? Third?
How did we get here? What can we do? Maybe it starts by trying to just... be normal about technology.
There's an orthodoxy in tech tycoon circles that's increasingly referred to, ironically, as "tech optimism". I say "ironically", because there's nothing optimistic about it. The culture is one of deep insecurity, reacting defensively, or even lashing out aggressively, when faced with any critical conversation about new technology. That tendency is paired with a desperate and facile cheerleading of startups, ignoring the often equally interesting technologies stories that come from academia, or from mature industries, or from noncommercial and open source communities that don't get tons of media coverage, but quietly push forward innovating without the fame and fortune. By contrast, those of us who actually are optimistic about technology (usually because we either create it, or are in communities with those who do) are just happily moving forward, not worrying when people point out the bugs that we all ought to be fixing together.
We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools that we use, based on the utility that they have for us. It's strange to have to say it, but... there are people picking up and adopting AI tools on their own, because they find them useful. This is true, despite the fact that there is so goddamn much AI hype out there, with snake oil salesman pushing their bullshit religion of magical thinking machines and overpromising that these AI tools can do tasks that they're simply not capable of performing. It's telling that the creators of so many of the AI tools don't even have enough confidence in their offerings to simply let users choose to adopt them, and are instead forcing them into users' faces in every possible corner of their apps and websites.
The strangest part is, the AI pushers don't have to lie about what AI can do! If, as they say, AI tools are going to get better quickly, then let them do so and trust that smart people will pick them up and use them. If you think your workers and colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will help them do their jobs better, then... you are a bad leader and should step down. Because you've created a broken culture.
But I don't think the audience for these memos is really the people who work at these companies. I think the audience is the other CEOs and investors and VCs in the industry, just as it was for the other fads of the last few years. And I expect that AI will indeed be part of how we evaluate performance in the future, but mostly in that the way CEOs communicate to their teams about technologies like AI will be part of how we all evaluate their performance as leaders.
By many measures, 1986 was the greatest year of Prince’s extraordinary career. One of the most remarkable metrics was that he recorded over 250 songs that year, many of which were released on his own albums or that he gave away to other artists over the years. But one of those tracks has remained stubbornly locked away in Prince’s vault all these years, and it’s one that the world most needs to hear: the only song that Prince recorded specifically for Dolly Parton. It’s time for Dolly to finally add her vocals to the song, and finish the long-delayed collaboration between these two geniuses that we all didn't know we were waiting for.
Despite the fact that Prince wrote nearly every song that he ever recorded, including hundreds of other songs that year alone, the track that he recorded for Dolly is actually a cover song. It's his own take on Fontella Bass’ 1965 hit “Rescue Me”. The song is a gem, and to modern ears probably sounds like a Motown song by Aretha Franklin, though it is neither. The Chess Records classic has Minnie Riperton on background vocals, and the standout drums are by Maurice White, who would found Earth, Wind and Fire just a few years later. (And who almost ended up producing Prince's debut album.)
Casual fans might be a bit surprised to find out that Prince would record a song for an artist like Dolly, since she seems somewhat outside of the genres he was best known for (especially as he was seen as scandalously controversial at the time, and Dolly is generally seen as extremely wholesome). But in reality, it wasn’t so remarkable that Prince might create a song for Dolly; he was collaborating with all kinds of artists in every genre in that era. For example, the recording of “Rescue Me” in October of 1986 took place just two weeks before the release of Dolly's friend Kenny Rogers’ album They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To, which featured “You’re My Love”, written by Prince.
In fact, the airwaves in 1986 were full of Prince compositions; besides his own recent number one hit, “Kiss”, the Bangles had just had a smash with "Manic Monday" (hear Prince's version), Sheila E.’s "A Love Bizarre" was all over the radio, and in that year alone, Prince was cranking out new tracks in the studio for everyone from Bonnie Raitt to Patti Labelle to Sheena Easton to half a dozen other proteges on his own label.
We know these kinds of details because the Prince fandom keeps meticulous records, like the spreadsheet of all of his recordings and as you can see in that post, Prince wanted to make sure fans knew those details — in that example, he told me the credits himself. This was clearly a part of his legacy he wanted to keep preserved. In 1986, then, we can see that Prince was in a particularly generous phase, and over the course of his career, we can observe that while he gave songs to over 150 different artists, he had a particular respect for fellow songwriters like Dolly.
Unfortunately, though, the collaboration was not meant to be at that time. Dolly said the song wasn’t a fit for her next record, which would end up being released in 1987 as Rainbow. The album got a bit lost amidst the success of Dolly’s work on Trio with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris earlier in that year. It’s also likely that the production on Prince’s cover of “Rescue Me” had a decidedly pop-oriented sound, and Dolly was clearly veering away from pop at the time as her then-new label shied away from promoting her as anything but a country artist.
Similarly, Kenny Rogers had chosen to completely re-record the song that Prince had given him in that era to give it a more conventional adult contemporary, pop-country sound, rather than go with Prince’s signature production style, even though the Minneapolis sound was extremely popular at the time. (Janet Jackson, for example, was becoming a generational superstar with Control thanks to having embraced and amplified that sound.) At that time, traditional white country audiences were still very likely to be too conservative to embrace songs that were obviously influenced by Black pop music. Radio programmers were often explicit about not playing these songs, and retailers like Walmart would refuse to shelve or promote albums with that kind of material prominently in their stores.
A Heartache
Another factor that likely played a role in Dolly not choosing to record "Rescue Me" at the time was the reaction to Dolly’s work on the film Rhinestone two years earlier, in 1984. The movie was a fairly straightforward premise: a country girl meets a city boy, and she tries to make a country singer out of him, and they show each other their different worlds and fall in love along the way. Unfortunately, instead of casting someone like Dolly’s frequent collaborator Kenny Rogers or some charismatic young singer from the big city, the studio chose to cast… Sylvester Stallone. Stallone was near the peak of his power and influence — he would co-write and star in both Rambo and Rocky IV the following year — and he took it upon himself to rewrite much of Rhinestone, much to the detriment of the film. This “throw the Italian guy into the genius musician’s movie” strategy was a disturbingly common studio pathology at the time; Warner Brothers execs had just made a concerted effort a short while earlier to cast John Travolta in the lead role in Purple Rain. (No, really.)
But Stallone was cast, and the film became a farce. Rhinestone was savaged by critics, Stallone openly distanced himself from the movie almost immediately upon its release (he would mock it as his worst work in the later years, and won a Razzie for Worst Actor), and original screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson carried out a public campaign against the film after he saw what Stallone and the producers had done to it.
The biggest victim of Stallone’s ego on Rhinestone was Dolly’s work, as she had not only (naturally) turned in a charming performance in the film, but had also created an extraordinary soundtrack. This had been particularly promising because the film came out in 1984, the year of a soundtrack's peak potential impact on popular culture through MTV's massive social resonance, as shown in everything from Footloose to Ghostbusters to Beverly Hills Cop to, yes, Purple Rain. Rhinestone could easily have been a moment of massive cultural impact for Dolly if her musical work had been allowed to shine.
This is particularly true because the soundtrack contained a career highlight of Dolly’s catalog. Lost in the shuffle of Rhinestone’s failure was “What a Heartache”, a song Dolly cites as a personal favorite amongst all the songs she’s ever written. She loved the track enough that she’d end up recording it two more times over the following years. As a Prince fan, it seems to me that, in a world where someone else’s ego hadn’t stepped on her film, this song easily could have been her “Purple Rain”. At the very least, it could have been a hit like Dolly's iconic “I Will Always Love You” was for Whitney Houston, but under her own voice.
So, it also seems possible that some of the reticence two years later to record "Rescue Me" might have also been reluctance to be attached to a song written by someone associated with a big soundtrack record from 1984, as it might have brought up unfortunate or unkind mentions of Rhinestone.
Ready to be Rescued
Now it's been almost forty years. Prince is of course in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the greatest induction performance ever, to match the greatest Super Bowl halftime performance ever. Dolly is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Dolly has embraced her status as a living legend. As Tressie McMillan Cottom definitively documented, Dolly traces the boundaries of our ability to parse race and class in America. And Dolly exists now fully, belatedly, as a rock star. On her album of that name, she finally covered "Purple Rain", deftly and subtly, imbued with her own fluency in crafting anthems every bit as powerful and culturally important as Prince's signature song. Indeed, if we look at the story of how the song "Purple Rain" was created, we see that many of those who were around for its genesis consider it to have had a significant country influence, and it feels like Dolly senses that innately in her version.
Just as important as the musical connections they've made, both of these artists have changed the fabric of the industry they shaped, paving the way for the artists that followed to have more agency, control, and empowerment. Prince said that the quote he most wanted to be remembered for was his pithy articulation about ownership of one's artistic legacy, especially as a Black artist: "If u don't own your masters, then your masters own u." Dolly evoked that exact sentiment, along with their shared gift for being incredibly prolific, in a 2023 interview when she was asked about Prince:
There are so many more parallels between these two titans. Paisley Park and Dollywood are both nearly-mythic places that seemed too fanciful, almost too magical to be real, but have somehow become real, tangible locations that fans from around the world can make their pilgrimages to whenever they need inspiration or connection or just some entertainment. We're constantly finding out new and surprising ways in which the philanthropy that Dolly and Prince supported for decades has sustained and uplifted those in need behind the scenes, whether it's the hundreds of millions of books that Dolly has gifted to children, or Prince being the surprise benefactor behind everything from solar panels in Oakland to the largest individual donor when the Black Lives Matter movement was getting off the ground.
There's no anecdote too wonderful that we couldn't believe it's true about either of them. There's no quote from either that isn't the best goddamn thing you've heard all day. "Find out who you are and do it on purpose." "A strong spirit transcends rules." "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap." "People say I wear heels because I'm short. I wear heels because the women like 'em."
It is time. Though Prince's estate had been in disarray of late, mismanaged by stewards who weren't up to the task, it finally seems to have stumbled to some semblance of stability. Dolly is, unbelievably, hitting her prime at nearly 80 years old. She has nothing left to prove to anyone, a legacy that is unimpeachably secure. The only remaining items are unfinished business for the joy of it, for delight, to remind people that unlikely and surprising things are possible. It's the sort of thing that both Dolly and Prince did routinely for decades, making the impossible look effortless, to toss out multiple era-defining tracks in a single songwriting session, or give other legendary artists their signature songs. To command a stage with just a piano and a guitar , and then impishly smile at an audience after knowing they just saw the best show they'll ever see in their life. To have Beyoncé tell folks that she's trying to get on your level. To risk a career and a catalog on ownership of one's music, label and legacy.
Dolly: Get in touch with Prince's people. Get on that track. Rescue me!
Towards the end of last year, I got the delightful opportunity to talk to Scott Carey for the Priority Zero podcast from LeadDev. LeadDev is such a wonderfully thoughtful community for people who think about how people create with code, and who manage teams who create technology at scale.
It's a wide-ranging conversation, and Scott was incredibly kind to indulge us covering so many topics, but I was particularly grateful to get to have the discussion at about 49:10 of the ways so many leaders in industry are trying to shirk responsibility, and I tried to articulate how those efforts ignore the awful, often immoral level of power that's vested in the hands of business leaders. We unfortunately can see exactly how that's being abused very plainly in every aspect of our society today.
For the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improving government efficency, with a primary narrative being around government spending. This is not the actual purpose of DOGE, and it's worth explaining what's going on here, but first we have to cover a few key background ideas.
A starting point that's important to mention: DOGE is not a Department. It has not been set up as a Presidential Task Force yet, and even if that does eventually happen, that would still not be the same as an actual executive "Department", as those have to be headed by a secretary and approved by Congress. I know they just wanted to pick the name for the stupid acronym, but words mean things. Anyway, let's see what everybody is up to.
Part one: What is procurement?
First, there's the concept of "procurement". This is the process of buying things in the federal government. As you can imagine, it's pretty complicated, though often that's for good reason, usually for historical purposes of avoiding corruption, like keeping people from having the billion-dollar contract to buy flashlights for the Army go to their friend who just happens to make flashlights.
Basically, over time there's evolved a process where things take a little more time and effort in exchange for being less likely to be corrupt in a big way. The classic example of corrupt spending back in the 1980s and 1990s was the famous stories of the government spending $800 to buy a hammer, or $600 to buy a toilet seat. (It's wroth noting, these were mostly folklore; there was never actually a $600 toilet seat.) Having a procurement process lets people review those contracts to make sure that no scams are going on, and encourages everyone to go with the lowest bid for the project.
At the end of the day, procurement basically controls how huge parts of the federal government works. Like anything, you can Follow The Money and see how an agency or department runs. Procurement rules everything around me.
Part two: What is capture?
Next up, there's the idea of "capture". This is a phenomenon that can happen any time something is complicated. If a system is complicated enough, the people who've got the system figured out are the only ones who can really drive it, and then the game is rigged. You know how rich people are the only ones who can pay an acccountant enough to figure out all the loopholes so that they don't have to pay any taxes? That's capture.
Well, the super-rich know exactly how capture works, and that's how they game the refs in everything they do. They don't call it "capture", they just think of it as their regular life, because anything that isn't rigged in their favor feels like it's broken to them! I know it's hard to imagine, but it's true. These guys just can't stand the idea of a level playing field.
Part three: Put it all together
Okay, so now that you understand the pieces, you can see how it all comes together. Tycoons don't like any game that's not rigged in their favor. And right now, government spending at the federal level is mostly controlled by an agency called the General Services Administration, which oversees procurement. Is it complicated? Sure! Sometimes the complexity is for the same reasons that processes are inefficient around the office at your job, and that's frustrating. But sometimes it's good, because they're trying to make sure nobody is buying $800 hammers. It's not perfect, and it's overly complex, but it is not totally captured by the richest guys in the world right now.
Now, imagine you were a tycoon who is also a defense contractor that is trying to sell hundreds of billions of dollars of military equipment to the government, and you know that the procurement process requires them to go with the lowest bidder. But, since you're a dude with hundreds of billions of dollars, it doesn't seem fair that the system isn't even more rigged in your favor. How would you "fix" this system? Well, you'd have to capture procurement, so that it was rigged to only buy stuff from you and your friends, at whatever price you guys want. And if it could screw your competitors along the way, and punish them for not kissing your ass? That would be a bonus.
Enter DOGE.
This isn't new.
"Captured" buying processes aren't new, that kind of corruption has been common around the world for much of the last few centuries, though a lot of Americans may not be as familiar with it. The way it's usually worked goes something like this: Want to succeed as a farmer? Well, you better buy your tractor from Fearless Leader's best friend's tractor company.
Or it could be more like this: Say you're a government employee trying to figure out who to buy rockets from. Maybe it better be from the guy who runs the "department" that's in charge of deciding where money gets spent in the government! But what if you're that government employee and you're still trying to do things by the book, and follow the laws as written, and listen to the process that says you should go with the lowest bidder so you can spend less taxpayer money on things?
Well, wouldn't it be a shame if the guy who runs the "department" also ran a huge social media company, and also had started mentioning individual government employees by name, and had a rabid army of followers who consistently targeted those employees for violent threats — including death threats — and had in fact just carried out two different terrorist attacks in the last week while specifically talking about how enemies of this new regime needed to be targeted for violence? Would that be enough to get you to reconsider following those written policies? Maybe so.
How do we know it's not about efficiency?
People who, in good faith, want to see government get more efficient, may ask, "But what if we really do want to improve government efficiency and reduce spending?" That's great! Lots of us who care about this stuff would love to see those goals achieved. It's worth asking yourself a few questions if you care about those issues:
- Today, 47% of discretionary spending each year by the federal government is on defense, but virtually nothing has been said about cutting defense spending. (It's almost half of the costs they could cut!) Why would they instead be talking about cutting veteran's benefits, which are a tiny fraction of that cost? It's almost like... they're not trying to cut spending to defense contractors.
- Would anyone who sincerely cared about government efficiency begin without talking to anyone who's been working on those problems in the past? Are they likely to make progress if they haven't learned from any of the mistakes made in the decades of earlier attempts?
- Is it likely that any organization is going to become more efficient if its employees are being targeted with threats of violence from strangers? If so, do you think you would be more productive at work if hundreds of strangers were talking about how you should be killed, and would you be comfortable if your name were shared in the group chats of the guys who carried out those New Year's Day attacks?
- Would anyone let any other defense contractor or government vendor run a "department" that was trying to reduce government spending? What if the CEO of Boeing said they were going to cut government spending? A big pharma CEO said he was going to increase government efficiency? Maybe the head of an investment bank was going to come in and reduce spending at the Commerce department? That sound credible to you? What makes these particular corporate executives even remotely credible to do this job? How is it not a massive conflict of interest to put people who sell hundreds of millions of dollars of products directly to the government in charge of reducing government spending?
- If procurement processes are the way in which all the money in the government is spent, and they're too complicated (which they definitely are!) how can you reduce government spending without engaging with the hundreds of advocates and activists who've been fighting to improve things there? Instead of targeting innocent government workers for violence, why not lift up and amplify the good work of folks in the Government Accountability Office, the independent efforts at procement reform, or just ordinary citizens fighting for simpler processes or to reduce paperwork and complexity?
The bad-faith style of engagement, the endangering of workers who have .00005% the wealth of the richest man on earth, the ignoring of obvious waste in defense spending... all of these signs show us that DOGE isn't about what it pretends to be. Instead, we need to look no further than the simple corrupt backroom deals of strong men dictators around the world to see how the friends of leaders get sweetheart deals to sell their stuff at inflated prices (and, usually, inferior quality) while everyone else foots the bill.
It used to be the kind of thing that Americans would point at sadly as an example of how other countries were struggling. Now we're failing to see the same playbook being used against us.
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This has likely already resulted in many games being pulled off the platform. SteamDB doesn't give a reason for these removals, but the timing does match up.
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mikeleonardvisualarts posted a photo: