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We Are Ruled by Used Car Salesmen and Grifters

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · 18d

Our public life has become unserious with rot.

Our Public Life Has Become Unserious With Rot.

If You Let Your Kid Use Sora, You’re A Bad Parent

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · 19d

Don’t rationalize it. Don’t negotiate with it.

Just say no.

And if your child screams at you, fine. Better they scream at you now than spend their adulthood unable to sit in silence, unable to read a book, unable to hold a single thought of their own.

AI Slop Will Raise Your Kids If You Don’t

Meta Bombed. Apple Chickened Out.

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · 26d

A failed demo means the tech is real enough to break.

A perfect video means nothing.

Meta’s Chaos Tells the Truth. Apple’s Cinema Tells Us Nothing.

The Pottery Barn Rule of AI

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · 27d

Colin Powell warned Bush: “You break it, you bought it.”

That’s the real rule of AI.

Deploy it in your workflows, and you inherit every hallucination, bias, and failure.

The vendors can walk away. You can’t.

You Break It, You Bought It

The Random Nut Theory of History

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Sep 15

Kennedy wasn’t cut down by the Soviets or the mob.

He was cut down by a drifter with a rifle.

That fragility is unbearable - so we invent cabals to feel safe.

www.theindex.media/p/the-random...

Conspiracy is Comfort. Randomness is Terror.

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Sep 13

Apple survived Steve Jobs.

Microsoft thrived after Gates.

If Tesla can’t survive Musk, maybe it deserves its decline.

www.theindex.media/p/a-trillion...

A Trillion-Dollar Joke

The Fragility of Fealty

The Fries-With-That Software Model

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Sep 13

Freemium is broken.

Obsidian shows a better way: give the burger away, sell the fries.

The base app is complete. The business is optional services.

Trust compounds. Adoption explodes. Everyone wins.

www.theindex.media/p/the-fries-...

Give Away the Burger. Charge for the Fries.

The AI Browser Wars Don't Matter

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Sep 9

AI browsers are like indie bands.

Loved by enthusiasts.

Ignored by the masses.

And they don’t move the charts.

www.theindex.media/p/the-ai-bro...

Why No One Will Switch to an AI Browser

Why Pop Culture is Created for the Machine

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Sep 4

Around 2010, culture stopped being made for people.

It started being made for algorithms.

A short history of how the feed rewired art 🧵

www.theindex.media/p/why-pop-cu...

The Index Plus

Aggregation Theory After Aggregation

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Sep 2

Every aggregator promised neutrality.

Google: relevance.
Amazon: convenience.
Apple: curation.
Facebook: reach.

Once scale is won, neutrality collapses into extraction.

That collapse = the end of the aggregator illusion.

www.theindex.media/p/aggregatio...

What Breaks When Everything Is an Aggregator?

Notes on Swift, Kelce, and Scale

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Aug 28

Swift has cultural gravity.

Kelce has America’s biggest sport.

Instagram has global distribution.

Put them together → orders of scale the rest of us can’t imagine.

www.theindex.media/p/notes-on-s...

The Index Plus

Why AI Will Outlast the Bubble

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Aug 21

Critics hope a bubble burst means the end of AI.

History says otherwise.

Bubbles kill firms, not technologies.

www.theindex.media/p/why-ai-wil...

Members Only

The Collapse of the Middle

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Aug 14

The gravitational pull of network effects has intensified at the top. The comfortable middle, the natural landing place for products with a loyal but non-universal audience, is being squeezed out of existence.

www.theindex.media/p/the-collap...

The Dispatch

Perplexity's Chrome Bid is a $34.5 Billion Publicity Stunt

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Aug 13

Perplexity offering $34.5 billion for Chrome is like showing up at to an auction for the Biltmore Estate with Chuck E. Cheese tokens and an IOU.

www.theindex.media/p/perplexity...

The Economics of Attention

GitHub’s Neutrality Is Over

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Aug 12

Copilot is the crown jewel.

GitHub is the distribution channel.

Developers are the training data.

www.theindex.media/p/github-s-n...

CoreAI’s Takeover Means Every Commit Is Now Part of Microsoft’s AI War Chest

The Future Is Certain. It’s the Past That Keeps Changing.

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Aug 5

You can argue with data.

You can question methods.

But when the government starts firing people for publishing inconvenient truths, it’s no longer about statistics.

It’s about power.

www.theindex.media/p/the-future...

Trump Didn’t Like the Numbers. So He Fired the Referee.

The Future Is Certain. It’s the Past That Keeps Changing.

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Aug 4

We tend to think of bureaucrats as bit players. But a nation with no credible statistics cannot know itself. It drifts. It improvises. It guesses. Over time, it forgets how to tell the difference between measurement and mood.

www.theindex.media/p/the-future...

Trump Didn’t Like the Numbers. So He Fired the Referee.

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Jul 28

Winston Churchill, after being outmaneuvered at Yalta, warned that feeding the crocodile does not guarantee it will eat you last. In the current case, the EU has fed the crocodile and called it diplomacy.

www.theindex.media/p/the-crocod...

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Jul 24

This is Trump's conundrum:

Once people become convinced that something is being hidden, evidence to the contrary simply confirms the concealment.

The logic becomes circular: any lack of evidence is the evidence.

www.theindex.media/p/jeffrey-ep...

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Jul 22

The problem isn’t just that Jubilee fails to change minds. It’s that it convinces people they are learning, when what they are actually doing is binge-watching ideologies collide.

www.theindex.media/p/jubilee-is...

On the Fragility of Ideological Coalitions

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Jul 17

The Jacobins began by purging monarchists. Then they purged Girondins. Then they purged their own. Robespierre, the architect of the Terror, died by the same guillotine he praised. Because once you've built a political project on the righteousness of purity, you're next.

Purity Tests Scale Badly

Liberty Is the Right to Be Wrong

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The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Jul 16

There is a reason liberty requires courage. Because it forces you to inhabit a world in which you are not always in control. Where your deepest convictions can be mocked, your values criticized, your institutions doubted.

Some interpret this as a bug.

Some, as a feature.

The feature.

The Index: Members Only

Nobody Has More Contempt for Liberal Democracy Than People Who've Never Lived Without It

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Jul 16

The loudest critics of liberal democracy are often the safest inside it: they have strong passports, secure accounts, and protected dissent.

That’s how we get TikToks praising Stalin, monarchy-core YouTubers, and fascist subreddits thirsting for uniforms and vibes.

The Luxury of Disdain

On the Fragility of Ideological Coalitions

The Index @theindexmedia.bsky.social · Jul 15

You can’t enforce purity at scale without turning discourse into a punishment machine.

You stop building coalitions and start building inquisitions.

And because scale requires strangers, and strangers always disagree about something, your coalition collapses under the weight of its expectations.

Purity Tests Scale Badly