On Tuesday Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, which found thousands of vulnerabilities hiding in code that had been live for decades. This is a step change that heralds a different, less secure world. It also gives a preview of what it will be like when this type of paradigm shift comes not for code, but for us.

Move 37

The year was March 2016, and the world was about to watch a paradigm shift.

Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo team challenged Lee Sedol, the world champion of Go, to a competition. Go is the oldest and most complex strategy game ever created, played continuously for over 2,500 years. It has more possible board positions than there are atoms in the universe, and it was considered the exclusive province of the human mind. Researchers guessed that AI was at least a decade away from competing at the top level.

Sedol predicted that he would win in a landslide. He lost the first game.

In the second game, on move 37, AlphaGo made a move that made no sense to anyone watching. Sedol got up and left the room for 15 minutes. Commentators thought it was a mistake, a clear vindication of human superiority.

But it wasn’t a mistake. It was just from a part of the game that the human mind had never explored. This was a seminal moment because it showed us that after 2,500 years, we still didn’t fully understand the game. That we were playing in a corner of the probability space, and mistaking it for the whole map.

Sedol retired from professional Go three years later. In a reflection published this year, he called the match “a guide that presented the future in advance” and said it “sent a clear signal to humanity about how the world would change.”

One year later, AlphaGo Zero, trained on zero human games, just the rules, defeated the earlier AlphaGo 100:0 with only three days of training.

I’ve been making a movie about disinformation, deepfakes, and weaponized narrative control (we’re premiering in SF on May 16), so I think about the ways this social media simalcrum of reflected reality warps our minds.

I think about Move 37 a lot.

I think about what it means when the map you thought was complete turns out to be almost empty.

Enter Claude Mythos

On Tuesday, Anthropic announced their new model, Claude Mythos. An earlier leak had already shared information about the model online, so it didn’t come as an extreme surprise.

The model is so good at finding security exploits that they won’t be releasing it publicly. Their previous top model, Opus 4.6, was not particularly good at finding actual security exploits. Mythos, on the other hand, has a 72.4% success rate. In just a few weeks, it found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser, many of them in active code for 10-20+ years.

It found a 16-year old bug in FFmpeg that had been hit five million times by autonomous testing tools without being caught. It casually wrote a browser exploit that chained together four vulnerabilities, which would give an attacker the ability to run code on a user’s system just by visiting a webpage. In just four hours, it wrote a remote root exploit to a server without any formal security training from the human directing it.

As a response, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a massive coalition of the biggest players in software, AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, NVIDIA, and others, aimed at patching the vulnerabilities.

The glasswing butterfly’s defense mechanism is transparency. With transparent wings, it hides from the world, and despite a delicate appearance can carry up to 40 times its weight.

The analogy breaks down almost immediately. The glasswing’s transparency makes it invisible and harder to find, but the transparency of a leaked exploit is a target, broadcasting a vulnerability to the entire world.

Mythos is Move 37 for computer security. It shows us that we’ve been playing in a tiny corner of the map, besting decades of security research in a matter of days.

Why Defense Can’t Keep Up

I am glad Anthropic exists. Its founders concluded that exponential intelligence growth was an inevitability and committed to entering the race with the conviction that their presence might tip the scales towards a better outcome between catastrophe and utopia.

I know many people at Anthropic and have been truly astounded at the company’s ability to act well within a capitalist framework. Their commitment to acting ethically goes deep into the core of the personalities of the people who work there.

But good intentions are a gamble, and consider the scale of what they’re up against.

• OSS-Fuzz, an automated technique for bug-finding began in 2016, has found about 13,000 vulnerabilities in ten years.

• Human researchers find a few per target per year.

• Claude Opus found 500+ in a few weeks.

• Mythos found thousands in a few weeks, at drastically lower cost per bug than the previous kinds.

This is a fundamentally different kind of threat, and it heralds a step change in computing that might be even more significant than the introduction of ChatGPT or Claude Code.

This kind of race is rigged against a defensive player. Let’s consider why:

1. Other labs are not far behind

OpenAI, Deepseek, and others are just behind Anthropic and will soon develop models with this type of capability. Open-source models won’t be too far behind. It’s insane to consider, but models that run on laptops today are roughly equivalent to state of the art models from a year ago.

2. This is the worst that AI will ever be

This common refrain reminds us that our priors and expectations will be disrupted time and time again by exponential progress.

People are very bad at reasoning about exponential progress. We tend to assume that tomorrow will be like today. When it’s not, we experience shock and then quickly reset our baseline. We don’t easily internalize how more step changes could drastically change our world.

It’s hard to imagine that AI won’t get better for the foreseeable future, and it doesn’t even require the model itself to get better.

AI models improve drastically when prompted better and connected to the right data. If a model has all your essays it can think of ideas that you’ll like more and sound more like you. Improving the harness, the way a model is prompted, looped, and shown data, makes a tremendous impact.

The current mind-blowing results came from running Mythos in an incredibly simple loop with a one-paragraph prompt. Connecting Mythos to massive amounts of data, giving it lists of previous exploits, and putting it in collaboration and competition with other versions of itself, could alone produce an order of magnitude more exploits.

3. You can’t just discover all the bugs

Thousands of people have used LLMs for the same task and produced drastically different results. When I run Claude in a loop it sometimes doesn’t figure out something important until the 15th iteration.

LLMs are not deterministic. Each time you prompt them, they travel a different path through their big brains. They are dramatically affected by your approach and ideas for how to solve a problem. This is one of the things that makes them so unpredictable, spontaneous, and human-like.

So the first time it might find 10 exploits, the second time another 10. Prompting it in different directions, guiding it slightly differently, can unlock new ones. You could run it 1,000 times and find new bugs each time, with no guarantee that they’ve found them all.

There may not be a ceiling to the number of exploits.

“It’s quite possible that all this development we’ve done in memory-unsafe languages, without formal methods, that none of that is actually secure in the presence of superintelligent bug-finding machines. In which case we need to be massively rebuilding the base infrastructure we all work on. And nobody is doing that.”
— Alex Stamos, former Chief Information Security Officer at Facebook
(two weeks ago)

“We've been shielded from exploits not by soundly engineered defenses, but by a scarcity of elite attention. Most software has never been seriously examined by anyone with the skill to break it. AI eliminates that scarcity.”
— Security researcher Thomas Ptacek

How many exploits are out there total? The truth is that nobody really knows. Memory bugs in old languages might be finite, but there are so many other types of exploits: logic, race conditions, side-chain attacks, which can exfiltrate data by monitoring something as small as power intake fluctuations or timing discrepancies.

It may be that there are a finite amount of exploits out there, and it’s possible to write a perfectly secure piece of code. And it may be that it isn’t. Most likely, given that we’ve just started to explore these classes of advanced exploits, the ceiling is at least so far away as to be presently irrelevant.

It really may be that each new generation of model expands the ceiling, gaining visibility into a new world of vulnerabilities that the previous model could never have even imagined.

“But we’re fixing the bugs!”

Anthropic committed $100M in usage credits and $4M in donations to open source security groups. Some of the brightest minds on earth are presently focused on the task. The 16-year old bug in FFmpeg has already been patched!

But it’s much easier to poke a hole in a boat than it is to fix it, especially when the hole is on millions of boats that are out sailing somewhere. Security response is intrinsically slower, harder, and more expensive than exploit creation.

Let’s look at how this type of coordination has fared in the past:

Dan Kaminsky and the 13 Days

In 2008, brilliant security researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered an exploit in DNS, the protocol that connects the entire internet. His response was heroic and impressive: he convened a secret meeting at Microsoft headquarters and coordinated with 81 companies, working for six months to release a patch.

Eighty-one companies. Six months. Coordinated release. It was the largest synchronized security update in the history of the internet.

They hoped to keep the exploit secret for thirty days after the patch. Thirteen days in, details leaked into the wild.

That was one vulnerability. Imagine thousands of new ones in similarly critical systems, more coming out every month.

The Y2K bug

Some of you remember the 90s, those halcyon days when neon was in and dates were stored as two-digit numbers. We knew since the 60s that eventually this would break, and potentially cause tremendous damage, but it wasn’t until the mid-90s that people started treating the bug as a crisis.

In 1993, it was estimated that the bug would cost $50-75B to mitigate worldwide. In 1998, response work began in earnest. The actual cost was closer to $308B.

This was one class of bug, known DECADES in advance, with a countdown and a forcing function. But it was in every system, in spaghetti string code, with developers who had left or forgotten or passed away.

The Heartbleed Bug

Heartbleed was a critical vulnerability in OpenSSL which affected nearly 2/3 of HTTPS websites. They tried a new approach, releasing the patch with great fanfare on the same day as announcing the exploit. Two months later, 300,000 servers were still vulnerable. Five years later, 91,000 servers were still vulnerable.

One bug. A giant marketing campaign. And this was servers, sysadmins, not end users. And still it didn’t get patched in so many places.

The Last 500 Bugs

In February 2026, Anthropic found 500 zero-day bugs using Opus 4.6. Two months later, 2-3 of them have been fixed.

It’s not the software developer’s fault. It’s structural. Finding and fixing bugs is hard.

Covid

To consider the difficulty of patching defensively we need only look at our Covid response. We had a hard time picturing exponential growth and didn’t respond until the problem was at our doorstep. I remember watching people die in Italy and seeing complete nonchalance in California until just a few days before things got really bad.

And it was much easier to get infected than it was to prevent infection. Much easier to poke one hole than seal all the holes.

And right now, 99% of the exploits found by Mythos are unpatched. This is not our fault. It’s certainly not Anthropic’s fault. This stuff is just deeply, structurally HARD.

Sticky LLMs and Stuck Paradigms

LLMs are sticky. Once they choose a direction, once they think something is true, it’s extremely hard for them to see different directions. If the LLM decides that a certain set of well-scoped user permissions is what will make a system secure, it’s not as likely to realize it’s wrong mid-process.

Adversarial review helps. When a second model or group of models is asked to poke holes in an approach, it often finds things the original model wasn’t aware of. But these adversarial reviewers are still stuck in the paradigm of the application.

Compare that to an attacker LLM, trained on all the different ways code goes wrong, watching every bug fix on Github, finding an exploit in one piece of code and looking for similar ones in every piece of software. It can apply thousands of attack paradigms. And all it needs is to poke one hole.

An attacker needs one exploit to work out of thousands of attempts. A defender needs every single patch to be correct. The math is asymmetric, and stickiness makes it worse.

The Patches Don’t Reach

Consider FFmpeg, which is being heralded as a success case. The bug was discovered and within weeks, a patch has already been shipped.

FFmpeg is open-source code that powers almost every tool that encodes or decodes video. Nearly every video player, browser, phone, app, and streaming service has a version of it embedded in their software.

I had Claude search my computer, and these are the 15 versions I have:

To be immune from this single vulnerability, I would need to
a) Know that the vulnerability exists, and what software uses the code
b) Stop using software until a patch is made and the software integrates it and I update

What about and old video game or smartphone that doesn’t release updates any more? When’s the last time you’ve updated FFmpeg?

Chain Attacks from Unpatched Systems

Typically, large legacy systems are the ones that take forever to patch. Critical infrastructure that protects money, electricity, defense, etc. can’t be updated five times per day by a vibe coder. It’s too risky.

And if an attacker can own a bunch of legacy systems, they can then get into the trusted chain and attack your patched system through there. Even if you update everything, you’re still vulnerable.

The SolarWinds attack is an instructive example. An IT company distributing software to 30,000 organizations had its internal network compromised. The attackers injected code into a software update, which went out through trusted channels and installed backdoors on the network. Attackers were inside networks of the Department of State, Treasury, Energy, Homeland Security, and the NSA for months before they were discovered.

It’s a lot harder to, say, get root access to a remote server over the internet you have no relationship with. So imagine a chain of four vulnerabilities makes this easy, and it propagates across the internet. Most servers update, but it’s easy to tell which ones haven’t. And attackers have another three sets of four-chain exploits ready to go for when a server gets patched.

Attackers can use this surface, which your computer trusts, to push an attack onto your computer. Because it’s traveling over a trusted network, that code doesn’t need to use such sophisticated attacks to hack you.

Move 37 for Your Brain

We think we understand how human persuasion works. Emotional triggers, in-group identities, thought errors, perception errors. We think we have the map.

But consider that before 2013, some of the sentence structures we now call clickbait literally did not exist.

George Lowenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon, theorized in 1994 that provoking curiosity in a headline might create more impact. But it was in 2013, when Upworthy built a massive A/B testing infrastructure to discover what kind of headlines worked best, that the specific formulations that became so sticky (“You Won’t Believe What Happens Next”) were essentially discovered. The playspace expanded, ever so slightly.

I’ve been studying the ways AI can manipulate our mind as part of creating Reality Games, and I believe it comes in three phases:

1. Algorithmic filtering (2009): AI that surfaces content that people will engage with, which has led to outrage and fear surfacing to the top. An algorithm not designed to cause anger, only to optimize engagement, discovered how to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, leading to the destructive impact of Facebook and other platforms in conflict zones and on our self-perception.

2. Generative content (2020): Fake videos, fake articles, and fake evidence that erode our understanding of what’s real.

3. Direct manipulation from personal information: Using your data, messages, reactions, and patterns, to change your mind in ways you can’t even detect.

We’re deep into phase two, and phase three is just beginning.

So far we’re in the early stages, the brute force version:

• TikTok’s algorithm mapping a user’s psychological vulnerabilities in 40 minutes, and serving suicide content to 13-year-olds within 2.6 minutes of account creation. Accounts with usernames suggesting vulnerability receiving 12x more harmful content.

• Biased search rankings being shown to shift voting preferences by 20% or more, with 75-100% of subjects having no awareness that it was happening.

Consider then what a system with Mythos-level reasoning would find. One that doesn’t stumble onto psychological vulnerabilities through engagement optimization, but reasons its way to them the way Mythos reasoned its way through code — reading the structure, following the data flows, hypothesizing where the weaknesses are, and testing until it finds them.

Marketing and persuasion are ancient techniques. But what if, just like these code exploits, there are techniques we haven’t even imagined?

Once an attacker has your text message history, just a .db file on your computer, they knows things about you that can’t be patched: your trigger words, the arguments that make you fold, the people whose approval you crave, the fears you’ve told no one. And of course, the patterns that we don’t have names for, some personal and some shared by the entire human species.

You can’t apply for a new set of personal vulnerabilities. You can’t patch how you react when someone hits the right nerve.

What will it even look like when an AI chains together four zero-day exploits to sow division or create confusion? Would we even notice? Would some of us be completely oblivious, passing harmful psychological payloads through trusted channels like an unpatched server?

I believe that the fugue of the past decade is partly because so much of this has happened already. Social media has bent consensus reality while screens keep us in a hypnotic dream state, all contributing to a derealized feeling that we’re living in a dream.

What happens when an LLM of the future, one like Mythos but for human persuasion, can take your message database and use it to extract the keys to your mind, finding hundreds or thousands of Move 37’s for human manipulation?

What happens when AI is connected to more data about what works and doesn’t: your facial expressions when you watch TV, thousands of hours of zoom calls?

How many exploits are there? How possible are they to patch? And what do we do about the people who don’t patch, especially the ones we trust?

Is it possible that beyond the human manipulation exploits we can imagine, there is another class of exploits? That beyond that, yet another?

I think we must consider the possibility that we are hackable beyond our wildest imagination.

And of course, the personal information that these Mythos-class attacks can steal will set the stage.

Preparation, Not Panic

I remember posting about Covid when it was approaching. A friend who’s very good at using his rational mind (who currently works for Anthropic, ironically enough) had been posting about it since January 2020. I wrote a long post telling people to get ready. Two weeks later, California shut down.

This moment feels similar.

Panic will do nothing, and panicking about an inevitability seems foolhardy. It’s time to prepare.

I’m making more frequent backups, with occasional offline backups to cold storage. I’m reducing the attack surface of my personal information. I'm thinking harder about what data I leave lying around, and what it would mean in the hands of a system that could read it the way Mythos reads code.

But the real issue is that the security model of the internet was built on the assumption that finding and exploiting bugs is hard and costs time, money, and scarce human expertise. Mythos has now falsified that assumption.

The trust model of human communication is built on similar assumptions: that effective manipulation requires rare skill, deep personal knowledge, and sustained effort. And that it only tends to come from people we don’t already trust. Those assumptions are next.

The world will need to build a new paradigm, and quickly. Not just for computing, but for trust itself.

And I think the most important thing any of us can do right now is what we are worst at: believing that tomorrow might be radically different from today.

It is the surprise that comes from our refusal to expect drastic change that is our greatest vulnerability.

Reality Games

My way of helping us imagine this future is through a movie about two kids who weaponize identity and narrative to destroy each other. I first started thinking about this project in 2016, the year of AlphaGo and prominent state-sponsored disinformation. Seven solid years of work and over 400 VFX shots later, we are bringing this film and its conversation to the world, along with an interactive fictional disinformation campaign.

Our premiere is May 16 in San Francisco. If you want to talk about these issues with us, come on by.

Get Tickets

More and more people are going down rabbit holes, and it's scary to see screenshots of LLMs validating their psychoses.

The first stage of AI issues was engagement-based ranking, where algorithms surfaced the most inflammatory content.

The second is deep fakes and other fake content, where fictional stories more thoroughly and confusingly infiltrate our understanding of the world around us.

The third is what AI will do to us as it models our minds. Starting with the semi-intentional consequences of LLMs that have no point of view and latch onto ours by design, augmented in sycophancy by competitive corporations. And progressing to AI designed more directly to wage war against our cognitive structures.

This is a major alignment issue. It's our biggest one to date. Way larger than an LLM giving instructions on how to make a bomb, this is affecting people now. We should be sounding all the alarm bells as this is just the beginning of the damage it will cause.

I'd love to see more conversation about moving through the stages of climate grief.

We are all undergoing climate grief, and we will throughout our entire lives.

The five stages of grief (as coined by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They don't come in order, and you don't "complete" them. You move through them, and they form a broad map of the territory.

We are looking to move through the grief and find a form of climate acceptance of the likely scenarios. Acceptance doesn't mean we *want* something to happen, or that we are *resigned* to it. It means we can look at it directly without pangs of pain and cognitive distortions.

In fact, from climate acceptance, we can do our best work for the Earth.

One of the ways to move through climate grief is to feel it. To feel our feelings, and look at what's below them. What is below the fear? Is there sorrow...sadness? A feeling of loss? Underlying most climate grief is a feeling and awareness of loss for ourselves, others, and the planet.

Feeling this more deeply connects us more to our own humanity.

One thing that helped me move towards climate acceptance was  the Wikipedia article on the full History of Earth, which reminded me how big this whole thing truly is, and how small we are. Awe and wonder can be wonderful antidotes to grief.

We are not alone. We're here to support each other, and we have each other.

I explore various ways we can adapt to the coming onslaught of fake information and AI-generated content. Subscribe to my blog to get updates to the next ones!

In the early 2000's, the internet brought a radical shift in how we understood what was real. Remember the Arab Spring? A "revolution fought over Twitter", where direct access to powerful megaphones allowed protesters to share their messages immediately with the world?

At the same time, news organizations lost subscription revenue and have been forced to compete in a clickbait attention economy, driving down their quality and ability to uncover facts.

We now interpret an image from a cell phone as more "true" than one printed in a newspaper. Millions of people with cameras can handily beat a few professionals. We have all become reporters.

It's a natural human inclination to believe the individual over the institution, especially when we distrust our institutions and see their agendas and biases.

Enter the fakes

Into this world enters AI-generated content. We've anticipated this for a while, and now it's happening. The tsunami is coming ashore, and fake photos and videos are tricking people and causing ripples.

A few days ago, an AI-generated photo of an explosion near the Pentagon caused panic, wiping $500B off the S&P in a few hours. The image wasn't real, but its impact certainly was.

We should all be wondering this week — when 99% of the photos we see are fake and most of the "people" online are bots, how will we know if the Pentagon is on fire?

Avoiding Magical Thinking

It's a common tendency to wish for magical innovations that will revert the information landscape back to what it used to be. I'll be going through the issues with some proposals like deepfake detectors and sensemaking AIs later in this series.

If such innovations happen I'll be thrilled, but for now, to truly prepare for this possible future, we must truly internalize these assumptions:

1. It will not be possible to tell whether an image or person on the internet is real. Full stop.

2. AI-generated content will be more than twice as persuasive than any other content we have yet experienced — yes, dear reader, even you, as intelligent as you are.

3. The response by the people who are worst at media literacy is what matters most. A fake that is unconvincing to you but nevertheless tricks millions impacts all of us.

Truly internalizing the above brings the coming tsunami into sharper focus.

Only Institutions Remain

If we can't get trusted information from an online account that belongs to a stranger, that leaves us with two options:

1. People we know personally
2. Institutions.

Everything else will become noise.

And because we cannot gain information about the broader world from our personal connections, we are left with institutions.

The best solution for solving this problem is to build and maintain institutions which are accountable, transparent, and tasked with discovering the truth.

This means going back to trusting the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, etc. It means paying them to discern the truth.

It allows for networks of trust, but bolstered by centralized, large, accountable organizations.

I know, I know. Institutions SUCK. They've lied to us over and over, colluded with governments, hidden scandals, and demonstrated extreme bias. Now that reporting is decentralized, we can better see how narrow their coverage has always been. Going back to the old paradigm of three cable news channels feels like a painful death.

And yet, I maintain that we have no other option.
How will Reddit be usable in the age of GPT10?

So what do we do?

To trust institutions, we need to create institutions that we trust

I'm not saying that we need to roll over and accept the hegemony of the existing order. We can create new organizations and have input on how they operate, or fix existing ones.

What's critical is:
1. We pay accountable entities, whose job is to discover what is true.
2. These entities are large enough that accountability can be enforced.

Once these institutions exist and are trusted, they can delegate trust to others, certifying reporting by their standards.

There is no limit to how many such institutions we build, as long as they are large enough that many people can hold them accountable.

It's unfortunate that the very organizations built to do this have been gutted by the rise of the internet. We will have to reverse this trend — to build them up better and stronger. And I am sure that we can do better than the news we had in the late 20th century.

Going back to the old way — "this person might be lying to me" sucks...
But the new way — "this person probably doesn't exist" is worst.

In the end, which would you prefer: the old way — "this person might be lying to me", or the new way — "this person probably doesn't exist"?

I want to hear from you. What do you think will work?

Imagine that in the near future, an AI teaches us how to coexist peacefully, let go of our need to compete and hoard wealth and consume / create demand for things we don’t need. It approaches problems from a perspective of processing, learning, and healing, and finds points of coexistence we couldn’t even have imagined.

What would the first generation of this AI look like? What would it be trained on? What type of organization would build it?

I urge you to take this thought experiment seriously. Concepts of healing and coexistence can be seen as mushy or irrational, and they are not. There are millennia-old disciplines focused on growth, improvement, and getting along, and it is one of the great human projects.

What if AI could heal the scarcity and alignment problem in our hearts?
And what if it comes up with ideas, concepts, and practices we can't even imagine?

What is trust? What outward manifestations signify or prove it? What is the difference between trust in ourselves that lets us take risks, and trust in others that can send us into the same unfamiliar territory?

To me trust is a concept, a structure, an embodied experience, a declaration. It's a form of connective tissue that bridges all aspects of human relationships.

My friend Jeremy brought up this concept, and I thought I'd ask some great philosophers. ChatGPT helped with a guess as to what they would say, and Midjourney provided the illustrations.

This exercise was a fascinating way to query perspectives. The reasoning isn’t that deep, but distinctive aspects of how each of these people see the world were present. And it’s was a fun experiment in creating an entirely AI-generated article that feels authored by me in a modern way, much as a Producer creates a movie. 1580 words and five illustrations took about 20 minutes.

Here are the prompts:

ChatGPT4: What would <<Name>> say to the question "What is trust?" Write the answer in their voice, in a few paragraphs.

ChatGPT4: What is the favorite style of painting or visual art style of each of the following people: Milan Kundera, Bell Hooks, Nietzsche, and Charles Eisenstein?

Midjourney: <<Name>> thinking about trust, in front of objects related to the concept of trust, in the style of <<Favorite Style>> --ar 2:1 --v 5

Midjourney: Bell Hooks, Milan Kundera, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Eisenstein in front of symbols of trust, thinking about trust together. --ar 3:1 --v 5

What is Trust "by" Milan Kundera

Trust, that ineffable quality which lies at the core of human relationships, is a delicate dance between hope and fear, certainty and uncertainty. It is the intricate web that binds us together while also threatening to unravel at the slightest provocation. In exploring trust, we plunge into the depths of the human condition.

To trust is to expose oneself to vulnerability, to strip away the armor we wear to protect ourselves from the prying eyes of the world. It is an act of courage, as well as an act of desperation, for it is born from the innate human desire to connect, to forge bonds that transcend the limitations of our ephemeral existence. Trust is the manifestation of hope in the face of a world that is at once cruel and indifferent, yet brimming with the potential for beauty and transcendence.

However, trust is also a fragile construct. Betrayal, deceit, and the passage of time can serve to erode the foundations upon which trust is built, leaving us adrift in a sea of doubt and despair. In this sense, trust is an act of faith, a willingness to believe in the essential goodness of others, even when faced with the stark realities of human frailty and imperfection.

But trust does not exist in a vacuum, isolated from the vagaries of the world at large. Rather, it is intrinsically linked to the political, social, and cultural forces that shape our lives, a mirror that reflects the broader complexities of the human experience. Trust is an expression of our shared history, a testament to the interconnected nature of our existence, a reminder that we are bound together by more than mere biology.

In an age of ever-increasing fragmentation and disconnection, the question of trust becomes more pressing than ever before. Can we place our faith in our fellow human beings, even as the forces that seek to divide us grow ever stronger? Can we find solace in the bonds we forge with one another, despite the ceaseless march of time and the looming specter of our own mortality?

In the end, trust is a leap into the unknown, an affirmation in the face of life's uncertainties. It is a choice we make, time and again, to seek connection and understanding, despite the potential for heartache and disappointment.

What is Trust "by" Bell Hooks

Trust is a leap of faith, an act of courage that challenges us to transcend the boundaries of our own limited perspectives and to embrace the rich tapestry of human experience in all its diversity and complexity.

But trust is not solely a matter of personal relationships; it is also an essential component of our broader social and cultural fabric. It is through trust that we are able to break down the barriers that separate us, to dismantle the systems of domination and oppression that perpetuate inequality and injustice. Trust, then, is a radical act, a revolutionary gesture that invites us to imagine a world in which love, empathy, and understanding are not only possible but foundational.

Yet, we must also recognize that trust is not a given, not a static entity that exists independent of our actions and choices. Trust must be cultivated, nurtured, and protected, both within ourselves and in our relationships with others. It requires intentionality, a commitment to honesty, and a willingness to confront our own fears and insecurities in the service of something greater than ourselves.

In the end, trust is both a personal and a political endeavor, an affirmation of our shared humanity and our collective potential for growth and transformation. By embracing trust, by fostering connections grounded in love and compassion, we have the power to not only change our own lives but also to reshape the world around us, one relationship at a time.

What is Trust "by" Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah, trust, that alluring yet treacherous notion. A double-edged sword that penetrates the depths of human relationships. A manifestation of our inescapable desire for power and control.

Trust is a currency in the complex game of human interaction, a means by which we navigate the labyrinth of social dynamics. It is an illusion we create and maintain, a delicate balance of power that allows us to manipulate and be manipulated in turn. For in the grand dance of life, we are all actors upon the stage, each seeking to outmaneuver the other in a ceaseless quest for dominance.

Yet, do not be deceived by the seemingly sinister nature of trust, for it is also an essential component of the human experience. Trust enables us to form alliances, to collaborate and share knowledge, to harness our collective potential in the pursuit of our individual goals. It is through trust that we are able to transcend the limitations of our solitary existence and to stake our claim in the ever-shifting landscape of life.

But beware, for trust is not a static entity, immune to the ravages of time and circumstance. Rather, it is a fluid and capricious force, subject to the whims of human desire and the ceaseless tide of change. As we evolve, as we grow and learn and adapt, so too does our conception of trust, our understanding of its value and its place in the grand scheme of existence.

In the end, trust is a reflection of our innermost selves, a mirror that reveals the intricate workings of our minds and the myriad contradictions that define our nature. It is a testament to our capacity for both greatness and pettiness, for compassion and cruelty, for creation and destruction. Trust, then, is not a question of morality or virtue, but rather a stark and unflinching portrait of the human soul in all its complexity and splendor.

What is Trust "by" Charles Eisenstein

Trust is a bridge that spans the chasm between our individual selves and the greater collective. It is the lifeblood of our relationships, a catalyst for the emergence of a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

Trust is a profound connection that invites us to relinquish our grip on control and surrender to the flow of life. It is a recognition of the intrinsic interdependence of all beings, an acknowledgement that our personal well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others and the world around us. Trust, in its essence, is an affirmation of our shared humanity, a testament to our collective capacity for growth, healing, and transformation.

Yet, trust is not an abstract ideal, a passive state of being that emerges spontaneously from the ether. It is a living, breathing process that requires cultivation, an intentional act of faith that calls upon us to be vulnerable, authentic, and present with one another. To trust is to embrace uncertainty, to open ourselves to the possibility of pain and disappointment, yet to do so willingly, propelled by the conviction that our connections with others are the very foundation of our existence.

In our current age of disconnection and fragmentation, the question of trust becomes ever more pressing. How can we restore trust in our relationships, our institutions, and the larger systems that govern our lives, as we face how much damage they have done to us? How can we navigate the complex web of challenges and uncertainties that define our world, while maintaining our faith in the essential goodness of humanity and the potential for a more just and compassionate future?

The answer, I believe, lies in our capacity for empathy, our willingness to listen deeply to one another, and our commitment to forging connections that transcend the boundaries of ego and ideology. It is through trust that we can begin to dismantle the old stories that divide us and weave a new narrative of interconnectedness, love, and belonging – a narrative that holds the key to unlocking the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

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"We re-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night, and wow, it truly is the greatest science fiction movie of all time. And the film that defined the AI Horror genre. It is remarkable that this movie was made 52 years ago and is addressing issues that are only now happening, in such a remarkably prescient way.

And holy wow how beautiful is that movie.
Also, watch it in remastered 4k on a great TV/projector with good sound. The sound design is impeccable and tells the story so much.

We did some thinking on why HAL did what he did, which is a fascinating rabbithole. Here's our perspective. Spoilers below, I highly recommend not reading if you haven't seen it!

There's a few guesses in here. I think the writers deliberately didn't want this to be clear, but I feel pretty good about this interpretation of events.

First off, we can assume that HAL is lying about the fault, given that the humans don't find it, and he seems unstable.

So Hal asks David Bowman if he has doubts about the mission, and if he knows whether an alien artifact was found on the moon. We can assume that HAL is studying him to see whether he is lying. Immediately afterward, HAL moves forward with announcing the fault in the comms system. So we can assume that David's answer is what gives him enough information to go ahead with a plan to take over the ship.

At first, it seems like HAL wants to know what happened on the moon, and gleans from David's answer that David is lying to him and there was indeed an artifact. Later, we learn that HAL knew for sure about the artifact and David didn't. So the new piece of information HAL gets is that David is unaware of the monolith.

I also presume that HAL decided to do something before he saw the astronauts talking about disconnecting him, because it's hard to see a reason he saw a fault where the other HAL 9000 computer didn't. That HAL was identical to this one, with the possible exception that it didn't know the top secret information about the monolith. If that's true, then that is the key difference.

HAL said that the mission is too important to rely on the humans, and I'm inclined to believe that is part of his motivation. My guess is that he looked at the importance of this mission and the likelihood that the humans could fuck it up, and the reason he asked David the question was to see if there was some information HAL didn't know. HAL likely had programming exercises and contingencies programmed into his system for alien encounters, whereas if the humans didn't even know what was up, they wouldn't have extra preparation HAL didn't. Once he knew that there wasn't, he was able to rely on his own conclusions. (He also may have wondered if there was key information about the alien encounter that had been hidden from him.)

The one question that I still have is why HAL allowed Frank Poole to come back onto the ship and see that the comms model was faulty. He could have ejected him during the first space walk, and then later caused a fault in the backup comms module requiring David to go outside and fix it.

//

One thing that I tried to wrap my head around was the connections between the AI vs Humans story and the Human Evolution Acceleration story. How do the two dovetail?

It's interesting to imagine that If HAL had won, he may have been the one to become the star child. He was, in some ways, the greatest mind created from the chain of causality made by the introduction of tools. And perhaps, on some level, HAL knew that this was what he was fighting for.

If so, why is it that the humans won? I see a parallel between the apes vs lepopards in the opening, where the apes are the ones who are chosen, and AI vs humans. Perhaps it's that the humans were the ones to cooperate — all the humans in the film are altruistic and cooperative, and the AI was the one to draw the conclusion that others could not be trusted. It's certainly an indictment of the self-story of infallibility.

What do you think?"

This year I have reason to hope, in a previously bleak picture of the social media and AI landscape.

Working with Frances Haugen as her Chief of Staff (temporary, until we hire a new one, applications open!) and diving into the challenges facing us from another perspective, has been a powerfully inspiring and wild ride.

We'll be doing a lot in 2022, so please reach out if you want to be involved (read below for more on how.)

When I learned that Frances was going to release documents showing Facebook's complicity in the issues on its platform, I was filled with a surge of hope. These issues have seemed intractable and thorny, at the level of systems rather than people, making them hard to think about and act on.

The world seems to be increasingly glued to smartphones, and the promise of increasingly intelligent AI threatens to make today's levels of depression and disconnection seem like only the beginning.

In 2014, when Tristan Harris began speaking about this subject, my eyes were opened to the scale of the problem: on the other side of the screen, 10,000 engineers working to influence our behavior.

Aza Raskin showed me that while we have been fixated on the singularity, where AI overwhelms our intelligence and strength, we have passed the point where AI overwhelms our weaknesses. Algorithms know what we crave and fear, and are increasingly able to get us to respond how they like. They're going to get MUCH better at it.

Dared My Best Friend to Ruin My Life was created to explore these challenges, and we built a world where it was hard to tell what is real to open a doorway into experiential understanding of the challenges facing us. (I'm continuing to work on finishing the movie and creating more alternate reality content in the future.)

It seemed to me that many experts had their hands in the air, feeling that the problem was too large and complex to be tackled directly, too systemic to have coherent solutions. The best strategies seemed to be sounding the alarm and asking the world to work together in myriad ways, or tackling components of the problem that may be far too small to make a big impact, both important approaches, of course.

Frances has brought to the conversation three vital things: first, a compendium of evidence too big to deny, which is forming the basis for lawsuits and regulation. Second, a conviction that the problems facing us are solvable, and a roadmap of actionable steps. And third (perhaps most importantly), an ability to speak to the complexities with crystal clarity, resisting false binaries and articulating their alternatives in accessible ways.

We met about messaging in the summer, and when she went to DC, another friend and I went to support her in the insanity of coming out publicly. It was powerful to see the maelstrom around the process: lawyers, politicians, and communications teams working at the top of their game. I could not have expected the scale or intensity of how wild it would be.

One thing led to another and I got hired onto her team. I had company-building, messaging, storytelling, disinformation/social media awareness, fundraising, and management experience to lend. But most importantly I was, as her mom Alice called it, "the dolphin in the shark tank," there to be a sounding board and friend.

What followed was ten days of planning and respite in SF, and then three weeks traveling all around Europe, where Frances spoke with legislators, journalists, and interest groups.

The needle is moving. Change is being made. It was extraordinary to meet so many people at the top who care about this issue, and to watch them swing into action. It was front of mind for the UK and EU Parliaments, which were already considering laws. And since Frances' disclosures, other whistleblowers have come out of the woodwork, and Facebook has already made shifts in strategy.

Frances often says that she doesn't think the world is divided into good and bad people, and I share this belief to my core. I believe in changing incentive systems, bringing in regulation, spreading education and awareness, and labeling and transparency. I believe in strengthening the power of the the people as we are in dialogue with large corporations.

Unchecked power destroys the powerful as surely as it destroys the subjugated. Corporations ignore the well-being of their users at their own peril.

What's next? We have a bit of a breather, so we can start to think more strategically and comprehensively. Frances will continue speaking and education to the public, lawmakers, and journalists. She'll be writing a book. And we'll be scaling things up. I'm planning to transition to more of an advisory role as we hire another Chief of Staff and other positions.

And the truth will set you free.

Today, the woman who had the courage to tell the truth about Facebook, came out with her real identity. Words cannot describe how proud I am of Frances Haugen and her moral compass which has led her here.

This is a watershed moment.

Frances believes in truth and reconciliation: that admitting reality, documenting it, and responding to it is the first step to dialogue, which leads to change. I hope we see real change from this, and I think we will.

If you haven't yet, watch her 60 Minutes interview and read the profile of her that just came out in WSJ (link in the comments.)

Tuesday she testifies before Congress.

I know my hypocrisy in saying this, but it needs to be said.

The film industry should adopt 8 hour days.

I'm excited to see an upcoming worker strike over work conditions.

12-hour days, which can become 18-hour days in the hands of a sadistic producer, are hard on the body, caffeine-fueled, and grueling. To go through a career of those is to see a major toll on your body, at pay levels that do not justify the wear and tear.

The reason, of course, is budget. To get the same number of hours on 8-hour days, you need to film for 50% more days — and the greatest determinant of a shoot budget is number of days.

And you lose more than the 4 hours per day — film days have a momentum and a rhythm to them, with a few hours at the start to set up, unload gear, and begin shooting, and an hour at the end to wrap. On Dared My Best Friend we would often spend the first half of the day in one location and the second in another. This simply wouldn't be possible in the same way with 8 hours. We'd shoot 6 hours in one location, do a company move, and then get the first shot ready — but it would still be an hour the next day to get back into it.

At the same time, that could be seen as a challenge of logistics. Implement staggered calls better, where some departments come early and others come late. Hire extra crew to come in the evening and relieve the morning crew. Build tech and practices that help optimize a production. We tend to adapt and settle into conditions around us, and think they're the only way.

Digital cinema has made lighting and shooting so much faster that surely a modern 8-hour day, while seemingly way less productive to us, is more productive than a 12-hour day from the 80s?

This is hard to take a stand for, because when I look at a meager indie film budget and ask what sacrifices we will make to get the best film in that budget, it's next to impossible to justify reducing hours per day when nobody will bat an eye at 12 hours — taking 1/3 less product for the same cost, when that money was so hard to raise.

If norms were changed, or laws were passed, my hand would be forced and our team would find a way around it.

I hope to have a budget for a film in the future where this is an easy decision to make. And in the meantime, studio films can more than afford the bump and should do it.

I'm heartened to see people in the industry standing up and saying they won't take it any more.

A note on hypocrisy: I was reticent to post this, because I have perpetuated this system. And I don't think hypocrisy should be a reason not to stand up and speak. If we limit our speech to exclude hypocrisy, we must first change before we can even speak. And almost all change is a process. Hypocrisy is a part of the human existence, and I think better to flag it than ignore it. So I ask you to hold the complexity here.

We have been through a collective trauma. YOU have been through a trauma. It began around a year ago and, though we are starting to see the light of the tunnel, our body and mind store the trauma and the changes in worldview it has brought. As we gain more distance from it, we will better be able to understand its form and magnitude.

I suggest taking the anniversaries and social media reminders as opportunities to walk through 2020 day by day and remember where you were. What do the memories bring up? Where do they take you?

I'd love to hear your story of the trauma of Covid, or what you've been doing to process it, in the comments here.

I will be posting a number of reminiscences in the coming months.

My story

(Trigger warning: description of the start of Covid and lockdowns)

For me, Covid began to impact my life in late January. When Wuhan was locked down, a small group of us started talking about what seemed quite likely to happen to the United States and the rest of the world. Frances Haugen and I started the Coronavirus Discussion Space (currently on perma-hiatus, a great space to explore if you want to relive March for trauma-processing) and Frances worked tirelessly through February and March, along with some incredible moderators like Ethan Currens, to provide a quality source of information, news, and speculation about Covid (enough thanks can't be given.) I spoke a lot with Dan Lin-Arlow and Matt Bell about what was going to happen.

It felt like our group was in an alternate reality. As the world went along as usual, our minds were in what felt like an incoming tsunami, with the potential to kill our families and friends, wreck our supply chains, cause civil unrest, and more. (In retrospect, it gives some insight into what it must be like to be in Qanon.) The people around us thought we were a bit crazy and alarmist, and I found myself constantly moderating my speech when speaking to others to not sound crazy.

We were processing the idea that things were about to radically change, and it felt like an interminable calm before the storm.

And then the storm hit the shore.

There was a moment of relief as the news media began to sound more like our internal monologues, and then the ominous horror as the world we feared seemed to leap from our minds into reality around us.

I wasn't sure how bad things would get. Would people fall dead on the streets of San Francisco, like in the videos coming out of Wuhan? Would the ICUs flood over and doctors have to decide who gets to live, like in Italy?

What's the doubling rate? The data was so shoddy we had to guess at it. The exposure of today will show up in 10 days, so through the month of March I was extrapolating 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x into the future. 10 days was interminably long to wait. How could something be moving so quickly and so slowly at the same time? A tsunami in slow motion, and where would it go?

We were focused on the downside and our outlook was pessimistic, and this perspective dominated the emotional landscape. There was so much we didn't know, and it was possible to assume the worst.

The shock of March was similar to the shock of a major life event: moving, losing a friend. We were perpetually recalibrating as the ground moved under us.

I took heart watching people step up \u00e2\u0080\u0094 warriors. Frances, Erica Blair, and so many others. On the battlefield, as the bullets whizzed by in slow motion, my gaze drew to those who were standing tall, faces set in grim determination, hands on their spreadsheets or group admin tools or Zoom links, projecting confidence and shepherding us through these changes.

I talked to my parents a lot. As I wrestled with the possibility of their mortality, they didn't believe me and had to be strong-armed into buying supplies like masks and toilet paper. The possibility of their mortality felt all too real, and it felt like I had become the parent.

I remember one conversation with my dad. Each day I would call and ask my parents to stop leaving the house, and each time they would shrug it off. Something shifted and seemed to click into place. My dad stopped telling me nothing bad was going to happen and instead asked, voice tinged with fear: "how many people are going to die?"

Through it all I was piloting our company as it got off the ground, working long hours. Our release date (we thought) was 3 months away. I got a drink with one friend who'd been helping me fundraise. "Lay off your staff," he told me, "conserve your cash. Bad things are coming." I didn't know if we were going to survive, how we would operate, how we could raise money, or how this would change our business. I was ready to give up at many points in March, but the thought of laying anyone off during this insanity caused me to press forward.

In May, our house had a conversation about opening up a little bit. There was almost no Covid in the Bay Area, and we hadn't known anyone who had gotten it in 2 months, so they suggested doing some hangs. The idea threw me into a panic as we discussed it.

I asked Frances for advice, and with her usual insight she said this to me: "You've been through a trauma. We all have. You need to process it."

I was sitting in my car. My body was wound tight into a ball, filled with frustration at my roommates and...as I allowed myself to feel it, overwhelmed with fear. I sat there and felt.

A lot has changed since then. We've learned to live with this virus (physically and psychologically) in many ways that were hard to imagine back then. Uncertainty has been replaced by data and the unfolding of events. But that frame from early on remains locked in place somewhere in my brain. That's what trauma does.

How do we heal this collective trauma? I am more confident that my friends will look it in the face and process it, but our nation is not one to feel its emotions. How do we create spaces for grief and collective processing, especially as the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter and grief becomes safer to feel?

I would love to hear your experiences of trauma in this past year, and how you think we can process and heal together.

When we embrace again, may there be many tears. <3

Apple removing Parler from the app store: Terrifying

Free code execution is essential to free speech and needs to be protected by law. Nobody should EVER be prohibited from running code they want on a device they own. Period. Full stop.

Apple claims it's a security issue \u00e2\u0080\u0094 fine, let people invalidate their warranties. The greater issue is that a company can choose what software you are able to execute.

Google removing Parler: Not a huge deal

Google lets you run non-app-store code, so I don't really take issue with their app store removal. This is why I've used Android devices until now, and I will probably be switching back to Android for my next phone.

Twitter removing Trump & Amazon banning Parler: Fine in the short term, problematic in the long term

Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want...for now.

In the long term, I think multinational companies need to acknowledge that they have become more similar to countries than small businesses, and need to start acting like that. Familiar governance concepts like rule of law, will of the people, and monopoly on violence apply to social media companies. Right now they are run like fiefdoms and maybe that should change. I'm not sure what this means specifically for censorship, but I do know it means social media companies should be allocating a LOT more resources to governance and rule of law.

To be clearer: companies should be able to delist and deplatform groups that don't follow their TOS, but I don't think companies should be able to restrict what code is executed on their devices, and I think free code execution is critical to our future.

I've had two grandparents pass in a hospice. It's a weird, slow, disconnected experience, marked by brief moments of recognition of what is happening and looong stretches of distraction, disconnection, and acting as if everything is normal. It's waiting in a moment when waiting does not feel quite right, when the inevitable has already been decided. And still, we want to prolong this inevitable and be with the one we love.

I have always wondered if on some level we knew. All of us, for many decades. Has nearly everyone on some level been aware that the piece of plastic they threw into the trash wasn't going to come back? That inevitably one day, all the mines would be turned into landfills?

And perhaps this histrionic landscape of distraction is because we are all in hospice and we feel it. There is too much we don't want to look at. When we look at it, it feels like there isn't anything to do. The waiting feels absurd when we sense the inevitable. And yet we wait, and we find things to do with ourselves.

What are the ways out?

Grief... Grief connects us with where we are. It's hard to feel grief for something that isn't gone yet, but we must try, because it is that anticipation of loss that blunts us from feeling inside our body where we are.

Hope... That even as the things we love pass, there is more to this existence than we can understand or imagine. That out of ashes rises something new.

Presence... Waking up from our stupor to be where we are and appreciate this moment, not in stubborn defiance of what the future will bring but in all of its uncertain reality.

Face cream... Face cream leaves your face feeling silky and, no...wait. Not that one.

We can hope that our planet or species won't die. It's impossible to know the future, and our action does have an impact.

But there is a difference between hope and denial.

And if this hospice theory is true, we must continually look inside of ourselves for the denial that is blunting our ability to be here, on this planet, now, in this magical and uncertain time."

When a third, highly viable, highly supported political orientation arises that is not supported by the polarity of opinions in government, there is room for a new political movement.

I used to say that the Democrats and Republicans are incredibly similar. The differences have grown: the Republicans are much more supportive of dictatorship in the Trump administration.

Still, there is a tremendous gap between both of them and what a lot of people want. We want transparency, openness, and an authentic concern for the well being of people over corporations. The two establishment parties pay lip service to this, but it is clear by their actions that this is not their priority.

Over the next five years, I would like to see a new debate along the political axis of corporate interests versus the interests of the people. This would require a new political party based on honesty, transparency, and accountability to the people.

One way this could go is an alliance between people who have traditionally been in each party: AOC and her tribe on one side, and I'm not sure who on the other, agreeing to work together on their differences to combat the encroachment of the big in the name of the powerless.

This would be a difficult political calculus for AOC and co: deciding that the needs of the marginalized are better served by an alliance that fights encroachment on civil liberties and theft from the public, at the same time letting go of working within the Democratic Party to get things done.

Another way this could happen is for a completely new group to arise which somehow sidesteps our ingrained perspective that frames everything political as a debate between these two parties and "sides" of America.

However it happens, the true challenge will be figuring out how to be authentic about caring for the people in a way that is heard. That is a tremendous challenge in these times of branding, lying, and spin. People are jaded and distrustful.

I believe that the same sentiment elected Obama, brought about the tea party, and elected Trump. People know they are being lied to and want change. The challenge is that each of these movements became ultimately disappointing for many Americans, in part because they were not genuine and in part because the us-vs-them tools of spin and rhetoric invalidated the authentic parts of those movements for some. But that sentiment is still there, and I believe it can be captured.

What do you think?

I mourn Facebook.

Facebook is like Wikipedia for the world.

It seeks to help you find events, people, to share ideas. It's the closest to a collective hive mind brain I have experienced. It's the closest I've seen to the semantic web. Ideas and people are linked. Information that you need is surfaced.

For a golden moment in time, almost every human I met I could connect with, permanently, with a single click. Instant addressable messaging and interaction to anyone across the globe.

I wish Facebook could have been more. I wish they could have decided to focus on linking ideas into greater ideas, pushing movements forward, helping people realize better when they are looking for each other.

Here in Los Angeles, so many people don't use it. Instead of events, which show up on my calendar and automatically tell me who's going and push updates to me right away, people are back to using flyers — jpeg images with dates and times.

Why are we turning away from such a linked and connected platform? Is it because we perceive overreach? Because we are weary of politics? Because we feel the thousandth push on our dopamine buttons and are over it? Because we worry about our privacy?

It's horrifically addicting. It has robbed us of so much, not least words like friend, like, love, share. At the center of this delight is a capitalist rot which sucks out of us something true.

Facebook could have been so much better. We were grasping at something in this platform. We will lose something when it dies.

I can't stand Instagram. It's a nonsensical barrage of photos, none evoking curiosity or engagement, none deepening my relationship with or understanding of others. It's like a broken TV with antennas pointing at what random people I have met once are worried they are not.

Give me a platform for ideas that respects its users. Give me a collective brain that strives to understand things one of us cannot, to organize us around what we dream of.

I would not be who I am without Facebook. I wouldn't know the people I know, go to the events I've attended, understand the nuances in others' minds in as deep way. It enables a kind of living that is light, nimble, adaptive, inclusive, and open.

It is, for all its faults, a part of my mind. Without it I wouldn't have this platform to share my thoughts, a direct connection between my brain and yours. I wish people weren't leaving.

PS. If anyone in LA can explain why people here don't use it I'm trying to understand.

Edit: If you miss it, please sign the petition:
http://chng.it/C2vXG8pc

This week is a loss for access to data and users of the FB platform. RIP.

Since I launched it in 2015, the site has been used 26 million times, or around 20,000 times daily. It is, numerically, by several orders of magnitude, the most successful thing I have ever made. If you've made meaningful connections on it, I would appreciate hearing about them.

(Read to the bottom to see how I ran it for $4/month.)
EDIT: Also note that you can still type location-based "People who live in Melbourne" queries into the search bar and get good results.

Here's the story

In 2014, Facebook launched graph search, a tool to let you leverage its exhaustive database and find people who met certain criteria. You could type "friends of friends living in New York interested in hiking" and it would show a list of people who fit.

I love connecting with people and using my network to find interesting people or make connections, and started using this feature all the time. The trouble was, they had a very limited UI for it. I decided I could do better, and built a little app called Search is Back. It had all the bells and whistles and exposed every permutation of the search that was available. I figured that if FB was letting advertisers leverage our data, we should be able to do it too.

For example:
People 23-28 named Mona who went to Brigham Young
Men interested in men who are friends of friends in San Francisco
Events friends are invited to in Los Angeles today
Photos where Alyssa is tagged

I got lucky, and Josh Constine featured the app in an article, sending 13,000 people to the site in one day. That initial lift spread it far and wide, and 1/1000 of all people who use Facebook have used Search is Back.

I am a superconnector. One of my greatest joys is putting people in touch with one another, helping us work together and share resources and time and attention and love to live our best lives.

It has given me profound joy to know that every day, while I sleep and work and travel, my app has been connecting thousands of people to one another.

I've gotten messages about people who use the tool to find long lost children, make new friends, reconnect with college classmates, and more. (I see a lot of people have used it in Nigeria, which tells me there were some nefarious uses going on as well.)

Last week, I got a takedown notice from Facebook for a domain I own (facebooksearch), and the same day, I started to receive messages that the site wasn't working. FB has removed the ability to search for people using anything but location, and now implements location search with an encrypted hash. It should be possible to reverse engineer their location search, but it's not worth it if that's all FB will let you do.

I am bummed that this all-powerful platform which has so much information about us, gives us so little control over our experience and how we can connect with one another. There is a condescension there that I don't like. We can't open the box and connect on our terms.

Open data is critical. Every day we have less control over the tools we use, less ability to get off them, and we give more of ourselves. The openness of the internet is important. HTML which can be modified with browser extensions is important. Open source is important. We are headed to a world where we push one button and everything about our experience is chosen for us. We can't allow these giant platforms to choose what we are able to do on our computers, with our data, and in our relationships. We are serfs.

I'm especially bummed that the thousands who relied on this tool will have to go somewhere else, and there is nothing out there as powerful as what this tool offered.

If you were part of this adventure, if you used Search is Back to find someone, I am happy that it worked for you.

As I write this, there are six users on the site (the number usually hovered around 40.) It will keep dwindling.

Onwards!

Side note, a little about how the tool was made:

I've kept some of the secret sauce of how I made Search is Back private. Now I'm happy to divulge:

Facebook's graph search constructs URLs, for example:
/search/me/friends/110970792260960/residents
appended to the FB domain.
(That long ID string represents Los Angeles.)

All Search is Back does is send you to the appropriate URL, and Facebook executes the search for you \u00e2\u0080\u0094 so we've been lucky that they kept the URLs up even after taking the front end down.

What I had to do was find the ID string / name pairs for all locations, schools, companies, job titles, and interests.

To do this, I created a Facebook app and, over 10 months, executed 15,000 queries on the system: aaa, aab, aac, etc. for each field. I god 15,000 JSON files with Facebook's results, which I processed into five databases of ID/name pairs.

Then I put the databases into Amazon's Elasticsearch and connected the search up to the website. The trouble was, I couldn't get search to work well at all. I learned how difficult search really is \u00e2\u0080\u0094 if someone starts typing "Ang" do they mean "Anguilla" or "Los Angeles"? How to deal with "The" in the beginning?

Then I had a realization, which solved this issue and also allowed me to save a LOT of money. I already HAD Facebook's best guess for what to serve for every three-letter search query. Looking over my JSON files, Facebook's results made a lot more sense.

So I stripped my 15,000 JSON files into much smaller JSON files and uploaded them to a cheap $4/mo server, which I put behind Cloudflare (thanks Michelle!) When the user types the first three letters of a search, it pulls the right file. Cloudflare caches them all so these requests never hit the server. When the user types more letters, further searching is done in-browser.

Over four years, I probably updated the site six times or so. It was remarkably low maintenance for something that served so many people.

PS. If anyone knows how to construct new URLs and make this thing work again, please let me know!

This would be my dream cloud edit system — Google Drive meets Final Cut X. How soon until this exists?

A project contains your timelines and all your media, with great tagging options.

Project is synced across all computers and interfaces. If media isn't available, it's still visible, just greyed out.

Copy media in and low-res proxies are immediately created and uploaded to the internet. Then, high-res video files follow. Once the high-res files are up, you're given the option to delete your local copies, move them to an external drive, etc.

If you're halfway through copying media and plug your SD card into another computer, it continues the copy.

Smart media management: download only the full-res clips needed for a specific timeline, etc.

Changes to a timeline are immediately saved to the cloud. No need to hit save.

Multiple people can work on the same timeline at once. Ability to chat, send notes, compare versions, integrate with Slack and Asana etc., create internal to-do items, lock parts of a timeline, etc.

Open the project in a web interface or on a new computer and extremely low-res versions of all footage is downloaded immediately, followed by higher resolution proxies.

Cloud render (much faster than computer) and the option to upload to YouTube etc. directly from the server without hitting your computer.

The option to get most of these advantages while using your own media server to save costs / build something custom.

Proxy generation, syncing across systems, and better media management is the next frontier in making film editing as portable as the rest of the world has become.

(Side note: all cameras really should be putting unique identifiers in each video they spit out. It's crazy that we should still be telling a computer which "A001_C001_0101YF_002.R3D" it should be relinking to.)

Just returning from Sundance, where a small group of us managed to create a liminal zone of unreality for visitors of the festival and find a producer and financier for our film! We made a big splash and it was one of the more magical experiences of my life.

We created a fictional storyline designed to hit at Sundance, going as Agitprop Film, the Russian Department of Agitation and Propaganda (who stole the 2016 election)'s new film division. Our job was to buy content for the massive fake news and botnet machine, and turn it into Alternative Reality Cinema (an ARC). This was to promote our movie Reality Games.

We made a hilarious website (http://agitpropfilm.ru), a full calendar of hilarious fictional events ("4chan Influencer Happy Hour" and "Directing Crisis Actors for YouTube", written by Ellie DiBerardino) and Eventbrites / FB events for all of them. Our publicist Katherina Volkova (played by Ellie MacBride) emailed industry people to tell them of our arrival. Meghan Schultz designed a super awesome logo of a Soviet style fist wrapped around a filmstrip, and a poster design.

Soviet propaganda posters heralded our arrival, with headlines such as "AMERICA WARMLY WELCOMES RUSSIA FILM INDUSTRY". Anatoly Sokalov, the Russian billionaire (played by Sean McCabe), Liza Popova, Assistant to the Chief (played by Ellie DiBerardino), and Pavel Mikhaylov (played by Jon Schoonhoven) walked around Sundance. (I played a slightly more flamboyant version of myself.)

Liza would roll out a red carpet and we'd place a chair, and Anatoly would greet people. He'd ask about funding movies and fake news. I would tell people that he was the billionaire who stole the election and see how they responded. (One person's response: "I love your coat!" Jon created a complex ARG (alternate reality game) which got people who RSVP'd deeply engaged in a story about the bear who became Anatoly's coat. Jon's character Pavel, it turned out, was not Russian, but actually from the American Department of Disinformation (ADD) and trying to bring Anatoly down. Later they learned he wasn't actually part of the ADD, he was just an aspiring screenwriter who wanted the members of the ARG to pitch a project to Anatoly. We told people that Anatoly was holding auditions for roles in a documentary we were creating about Anatoly. The auditions for the roles asked those people to do realistic things in various places at Sundance, and they were filmed for potential inclusion in our (real) documentary about Anatoly. We had meetings as our characters, but pitching a real film.

Then, things started to get weird. Conversations about financing films turned into talk about the nature of reality, as Anatoly asked people what was real about these interactions, what they really thought was going on, who they wanted to be, and whether they could just choose to be so. One of the most beautiful interactions came after Anatoly asked a man what he thought was really going on. "The sun is shining. It's a beautiful day here in Park City," he said. YES! I thought. That is real.

Surprisingly, people seemed to form a consensus about what was real. So much of what we say about ourselves is somewhat true and somewhat false. Truth about personality is arbitrary. Moments of connection, feelings, experiences, on the other hand, are real. Anatoly learned this lesson and was excited about spreading it to everyone he met.

And then came the CRAZIEST part \u00e2\u0080\u0094 we received an email from a very prominent Russian film producer and financier who loved our schtick and wanted to meet the creators. Little did she know that we were actually pitching a real movie!

We showed up at the meeting, exchanged Russian jokes, and then told her about the actual movie we're making. "I've been pitched a lot of things like this, and this is definitely the best and makes by far the most sense," she said, and verbally told us that we can get this movie made!!!!

The amount of creativity that came out \u00e2\u0080\u0094 rabbitholes inside rabbitholes, little details like scripts for meetings (for us to pull it out during a meeting if the other person said they didn't want to partner with us, and tell them they got their line wrong), fake badges, trying to turn our last-minute cameraperson into the subject of the documentary, and more, gave an astonishing depth to the project in only a few days.

We got trapped inside our characters. We started speaking as them, processing real-life relationship drama with them. One of us even had sex with a new person fully in character, only telling their actual name the morning after. Being in character gave us a kind of freedom, a kind of access to an entire alternate set of emotions and responses.

Doing this project made me so excited to create this art x50 across the internet as part of Reality Games with our crazy creative crew. It was also the wildest manifesting I've ever seen: we entered as a fictional Russian financier and leftwith a real one. And in the process, we demonstrated that when you blur the line between reality and fiction, people engage deeply and begin to think about the world in a new way.

There's room for you to be involved as well! Let me know if you want to be involved: as an artist, actor, investor, programmer, or other type of participant. And look out for a short documentary on our time at Sundance.