Most conspicuous, in my experience, is the way that retailers have responded. It’s not just CVS; coffee shops seem to have gotten more hostile and less welcoming. This is, I suspect, because they are dealing with people who steal, cause a ruckus, or shoot up in the bathroom—disorderly behaviors that they have to deter before they cost them customers.

I increasingly think this is a more general phenomenon. Disorder is not measured like crime—there is no system for aggregating measures of disorder across cities. But if you look for the signs, they are there. Retail theft, though hard to measure, has grown bad enough that major retailers now lock up their wares in many cities. The unsheltered homeless population has risen sharply. People seem to be controlling their dogs less. Road deaths have risen, even as vehicle miles driven declined, suggesting people are driving more irresponsibly. Public drug use in cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia has gotten bad enough to prompt crack-downs.

Cities’ comparative advantage is agglomeration and network effects: concentrating people in one place can create innovation that yields ore than linear returns. But that only is possible if people have shared public spaces in which to interact. Community life, of the sort that makes cities worth living in, is harder to live in the presence of disorder.

A large share of disorder is generated by a small number of people and places—one drunk or one vacant lot, one uncontrolled bar or one guy shouting on the street, can ruin the whole experience for everyone else. Identifying these problem places and people, and remediating them—not exclusively through the criminal justice system—can bring disorder under control.

if you just think about the business model of the internet as — there’s a box that you can upload some content into, and then there’s an algorithm between you and an audience, and some audience will find the stuff you put in the box, and then you put an infinity amount of stuff into the box, all of that breaks.

more and more of the stuff that you consume is designed around pushing you towards a transaction. That’s weird. I think there’s a vast amount of white space in the culture for things that are not directly transactable.

We constantly ask huge amounts of the population to do things that are very rote. Keep inputting this data on forms, keep filling out this tax form. Some lawyers arguing for the Supreme Court, a lot of them just write up various contracts. And that’s a good job in the sense that it pays well, it’s inside work, but it doesn’t ask you to be that full of a human being.

I think a lot of organizations are not set up for a lot of people to use judgment and discernment. They treat a lot of people like machines, and they don’t want them doing things that are complicated and step out of line and poke at the assumptions in the Excel doc. They want the Excel doc ported over without any mistakes.

I think a lot of organizations are not set up for a lot of people to use judgment and discernment. They treat a lot of people like machines, and they don’t want them doing things that are complicated and step out of line and poke at the assumptions in the Excel doc.

I distinctly remember life before computers. It’s an experience that I had quite viscerally. And that shapes my view of these tools. It shapes my view of these companies. Well, there’s a huge generation now that only grew up in this way. There’s a teenage generation right now that is only growing up in this way. And I think their natural inclination is to say, well, this sucks. I want my own thing. I want my own system of consuming information. I want my own brands and institutions.And I don’t think that these big platforms are ready for that moment. I think that they think they can constantly be information monopolies while they are fending off A.I.-generated content from their own A.I. systems. So somewhere in there all of this stuff does break. And the optimism that you are sensing from me is, well, hopefully we build some stuff that does not have these huge dependencies on platform companies that have no interest at the end of the line except a transaction.

these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas.And I think that the power of human beings sort of having new ideas all the time, that’s the thing that the platforms won’t be able to find. That’s why the platforms feel old. Social platforms like enter a decay state where everyone’s making the same thing all the time. It’s because we’ve optimized for the distribution, and people get bored and that boredom actually drives much more of the culture than anyone will give that credit to, especially an A.I. developer who can only look backwards.

the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle, and an end to the story they’re trying to tell all the time about the culture we’re in or the politics we’re in or whatever. They will actually become the centers of attention and you cannot replace that with A.I. You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that we’ve always looked to other individuals to do.

I think as the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity actually will go up. I don’t think that’s going to go down.