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Will James

@willjames.bsky.social

3.5K followers 970 following 350 posts

Seattle journalist trying to understand many of the worst things Currently making audio documentaries with KUOW Podcasts: Lost Patients (2024) The Walk Home (2022) Outsiders (2020) Married to @sydbrownstone.bsky.social https://www.will-james.work/

www.will-james.work

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Will James @willjames.bsky.social · Apr 15

It is surreal to announce that Lost Patients is nominated for a Peabody Award alongside work by This American Life, Serial, NPR, The New Yorker, and many journalists we admire.

@sydbrownstone.bsky.social @esmyjimenez.bsky.social @kuow.org @seattletimes-rss.bsky.social @peabodyawards.bsky.social

Nominees in Docs, News, Public Service, Podcast Announced - The Peabody Awards

The Peabody Awards and Center for Media & Social Impact Launch We Disrupt This Broadcast, New Podcast Featuring Interviews with Quinta Brunson, Damon Lindelof, Ramy Youssef, Pamela Adlon, Charlie Broo...

peabodyawards.com

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 22h

Or maybe I'm overestimating how much regular people dislike this technology and people are pretty much okay with it / accept the tradeoffs!

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 22h

Maybe it's the sort of thing where elites realized this technology was unhealthy and quietly backed way from it and shielded their kids from it and left the masses to suffer the effects.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 22h

And there happen to be corporations and individuals that have gotten fantastically rich as a result.

It's not hard to imagine a parallel universe in which this became the target of some kind of movement... I'm wondering why things did not congeal in this way.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 22h

Everywhere there is griping and despair about these things from the micro (people complaining they can't read a book or sit through a movie anymore, teachers bemoaning screens in classrooms) to the macro (all of politics getting weirder and nastier).

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 22h

Genuine question:

Why haven't we seen more organized and widespread opposition to the attention economy and what it's wrought in so many aspects of our lives: political polarization and radicalization, attention spans, childhood development, losing loved ones to conspiracies, screen addiction?

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 3d

I shudder to imagine what a panicked, scrambling AI industry is about to inflict on human civilization in an attempt to make the math work on this.

Matthew Terrill @matthewterrill.bsky.social · 3d

I was already a hard AI-skeptic but this cements my long suspicion that there is no feasible path to anything close to return on invested capital for these data centers. Tech would need 15 to 25 times current AI revenues within the next 2-3 years just to break even. Not financially viable.

"I clearly hit a nerve in the industry, when judging by the number of individuals who reached out to chat," he wrote in an followup blog post. "In total, l've spoken with over two-dozen rather senior people in the datacenter universe, and there was an interesting and overriding theme to our conversations: no one understands how the financial math is supposed to work. They are as baffled as I am, and they do this for a living."
Kupperman's original skepticism was built on a guess that the components in an average Al data center would take ten years to depreciate, requiring costly replacements. That was bad enough: "I don't see how there can ever be any return on investment given the current math," he wrote at the time.
But ten years, he now understands, is way too generous.
" had previously assumed a 10-year depreciation curve, which I now recognize as quite unrealistic based upon the speed with which Al datacenter technology is advancing," Kupperman wrote. "Based on my conversations over the past month, the physical data centers last for three to ten years, at most."
In his previous analysis, Kupperman assumed it would take the tech industry $160 billion of revenue to break even on data center spending in 2025 alone. And that's assuming an incredibly generous 25 percent gross margin - not to mention the fact that the industry's actual Al revenue is closer to $20 billion annually, as the investment manager noted in his previous blog.

"In reality, the industry probably needs a revenue range that is closer to the $320 billion to $480 billion range, just to break even on the capex to be spent this year," Kupperman posited in his updated essay. "No wonder my new contacts in the industry shoulder a heavy burden - heavier than I could ever imagine. They know the truth."
Kupperman called that gulf between tech industry spending and actual revenue in 2025 "astonishing."
However, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. For example, how does it all shake out when we account for 2026, when hundreds of new data centers are expected to pop up?
"Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you'd need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend," he writes.
"If the economics don't work, doing it at massive scale doesn't make the economics work any better
- it just takes an industry crisis and makes it into a national economic crisis," he concludes.
Overall, the pessimists broadly agree: it's no longer a matter of if Al is massively overhyped, but when the whole thing comes crashing down.
More on Al hype: Data Shows That Al Use Is Now Declining at Large Companies

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 5d

Several of the conservative influencers meeting with Trump, including Choe, are from Seattle.

Mining Seattle and other blue cities for shock content has been a reliable formula for success and power among conservative influencers for years.

Some reporting that keeps being relevant:

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 5d

"Slop" is okay, but I'm really hoping "munge" catches on.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 5d

Here's Brian Eno with the most devastatingly accurate description I've yet heard of things made with generative AI:

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/o...

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 5d

Here's Brian Eno with the most devastatingly accurate description I've yet heard of things made with generative AI:

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/o...

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 12d

Reading @edzitron.com on how the rush to automate jobs using AI is a function of bosses being increasingly disconnected from what their companies actually produce, reducing every job to its outputs:

www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 12d

The Amtrak train that derailed in Dupont? I reported on that, but I don't remember the antifa conspiracies!

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 13d

Hearing "antifa" in the news is a trip; To me, it's such a relic of 2017-2018, when many of us covered regular right-wing protests and leftist counterprotests in the PNW.

Appreciated this necessary refresher on antifa and all the mythologizing around it by @letsgomathias.bsky.social on @kuow.org:

What’s behind the White House’s anti-antifa order

President Trump says he is designating "Antifa" as a terrorist organization and going after its funders.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 15d

Alternative view: What they actually built was a bunch of janky, addictive toys.

Adrian Daub @adriandaub.bsky.social · Feb 6

2025 will go down as the year when all the subtext became text

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 15d

A point missing from years of “learn to code” taunts:

Building a career out of any kind of creative work requires a level of risk tolerance, scrappiness, and entrepreneurship that’s probably alien to anyone aspiring to graduate college directly into a six-figure job.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 15d

At what point do journalists get to start taunting tech people with “Learn to write”?

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 15d

At what point do journalists get to start taunting tech people with “Learn to write”?

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 15d

Dude… buzz off.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 16d

Finally checking out this William James guy to see what the hype is about.

Reposted by Will James

Brandon Kennedy @bicycleidiot.bsky.social · 17d

RIP Kaleb Horton
kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/

I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I'll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it's actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called "wildly miscalculated" and you haven't seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee.
You can't help anybody when you're exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of "I would love to be dead right now" on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that's wonderful because we're not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 21d

I'm so sorry, Josh. For Seattle's sake, I hope there is a way for you to keep reporting here. If I can help in any way as you figure out your next move, please hit me up.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 21d

Many Cascade PBS journalists I admire are losing their jobs. Seattle is also losing a valuable piece of its news ecosystem. I think of the many journalists scattered throughout local newsrooms who passed through Cascade PBS/Crosscut at some point, freelanced there, or got their start there.

Erica C. Barnett @ericacbarnett.bsky.social · 22d

BREAKING: Cascade PBS, which operates the website Crosscut, is laying off 19 people, reportedly including its entire news staff. In an email to staff, CEO Rob Dunlop blamed federal cuts, saying the nonprofit is "winding down our longform, written journalism."

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · 27d

I did not! Didn't know about it.

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · Sep 13

If I could make people understand one thing about the computer, it would be that if a piece of information feels too good — if it has that sweet, addictive pull — there's a good chance it's bad for you.

People have come to understand this about food. Maybe they can learn the same for information.

Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · Sep 12

Wrote about the week. How the shooter's ID didn't appear to matter to ppl. How the discourse takes place in very same spaces that incubate/perpetuate hate & violence. How shooters now know that their acts will be flattened, analyzed, argued over & amplified. How all of this feels so dark & poisonous

Something Is Very Wrong Online

Our political conversations take place in very same spaces that incubate and perpetuate unthinkable violence.

www.theatlantic.com

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · Sep 10

I will not stop saying it: "Fantasy A Gets a Mattress" is the most authentically Seattle piece of art to come out in a decade. I hope the filmmakers get a distributer.

Some laugh out loud moments in this story by @vivmccall.bsky.social:

The Team That Made the Cult Hit 'Fantasy A Gets a Mattress' Learns About the Virtue and Danger of Whimsy

Fantasy A is a Seattle icon whose face has decorated lampposts and phone poles for a decade.

www.thestranger.com

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · Sep 10

A few days later, I'm still surprised at how bleak this made me feel.

Sometimes a piece of writing manages to pull something ubiquitous out of the air and make it visible.

Longreads @longreads.com · Sep 1

"Disney’s ethos began to change in the 1990s . . . but only after the economic shock of the pandemic did the company seem to more fully abandon any pretense of being a middle-class institution." —Daniel Currell for @nytimes.com

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/o...

Opinion | Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class

The theme-park operator, like so many other companies, is abandoning America’s middle class.

www.nytimes.com

Will James @willjames.bsky.social · Aug 31

Hold on, getting a master’s degree real quick so I can understand why all protest is automatically good and never backfires.