Last week an email hit my inbox with a simple and powerful sentiment. “I miss your writing,” it said. The person who sent it was a longtime reader of my work.

I miss writing too. But there’s a reason I’ve been quiet here and on other platforms — I wrote a very short post about that earlier this summer. To summarize, last year I decided to take the leap, for the seventh time, and start a company with my dear friend and frequent co-conspirator John Heilemann. John and I have worked on projects for the better part of three decades, but we’d never started a company together. Now we have: Recount Media is an entirely new approach to video about politics. And the truth is, Recount Media not only requires all of my time, it’s also in fields that seem pretty orthogonal to my previous career trajectory, including NewCo.

That reader’s email reminded me: I’ve not really explained the connection between what I “used to do” — write about the impact of tech on society, advise startups, work on boards, start or run tech-related media companies — and what it is I’m doing now. Turns out, the two are deeply connected. Explaining why takes a bit of exposition — hence this longish post. But in short, the idea is this: The tech story is now a political story, and the political story is, well, a mess. I’m motivated by creating companies and media around consequential, messy stories. Tech used to be the biggest and most poorly covered of the bunch. But now, I’m convinced politics holds that honor.

This post is my attempt to tie together my past, rooted mostly in the West Coast technology culture, with my present, now based in New York and focused almost entirely on politics and video. I hope by thinking out loud here, I might help make it make sense for not only you, my readers, but also for myself as I continue on this journey.

On its face it doesn’t make much sense. A guy who has made his living writing — either coding words into posts, or starting companies that, in essence, were word factories (Wired, The Standard, Federated Media, etc.) — is now co-founder of a company that makes only video. A guy who has specialized in reporting on and sense making around technology is now deep in the utterly foreign world (for me, anyway) of politics. What gives?

I realized that the tech story had morphed into something else back in 2015, when I was running an events business called NewCo. To support that business, I decided to create a small publication focused on the intersection of technology, policy, and business. We called it Shift. To launch that brand, I wrote “The Tech Story Is Over,” a framework of sorts for why I thought the biggest story in our economy had moved from “tech” to the wholesale reinvention of capitalism. From that piece:

Tech hasn’t gone mainstream — it is the mainstream. It’s our cultural dowser, our lens for interpreting an increasingly complex society.Our new cultural heroes are Internet billionaires; our newly minted college graduates all want to start tech companies.

All of which leaves me wondering : What’s the next big story on the horizon, the narrative most people are missing that will shape our future just as technology did for the past 30 years?

I think the answer lies in the reinvention of capitalism.

While tech had been the defining story of the past few decades, I argued that the story of the next few would be how our society rethought the rules governing corporations. And once you start thinking about the way corporations were governed, your attention naturally turns to politics. Politics, after all, is how we collectively determine the rules of the road.

At the same time we launched Shift, we also started a new conference of the same name, dedicated to convening a fresh conversation about business and politics. I asked Heilemann to bring his deep understanding of Washington to the stage each year. John curated the political piece, I ran the business programming. The event was very well received, and we both noticed how engaged folks were around the political conversation in particular. The first Shift event was one week after Trump’s inauguration, and nearly every business and tech leader was leaning into issues they had previously ignored or, in some cases, actively ducked. It was clear: Politics was on its way to permeating every aspect of our society, and business was a leading indicator of that trend.

We increased the amount of political programming in the second Shift event, and once again, folks loved it. By now I was certain that the tech and business narrative I’d been chasing for so many years had grown stale — the changes wrought by tech were no longer the story — now the story was how we as a society would respond. And just as with business, that response requires wading directly into the world of politics.

It was after the second Shift conference that I decided to move to New York. The Bay area is a lovely, inspirational place, but the conversation was dominated by entrepreneurship, and it was beginning to feel like a monoculture. I wanted to live in a place where the conversation had more hybrid vigor. I called my friend John to let him know about the move, and, turns out, he had an idea about starting a political platform devoted to covering US politics in a new way. We spent a week talking about it over the summer, got pretty excited about where it might go, and … well, that’s how we got to now.

In the past year, I’ve come to realize that while I thought I was pretty well informed about how our political system worked, I was in fact wandering in the dark. I had spent nearly my entire career in media and tech in the Bay area, but I had managed to fundamentally avoid engaging in the national political discourse. I don’t think I’m alone — the past few years have delivered a crash course in political realities for the entire technology industry — and for business overall. When hundreds of leading CEOs sign a letter claiming profit will no longer be the true north of their firms, something pretty fundamental has shifted.

We announced Recount Media’s public beta this past July, and we’ll have a lot more to announce later this Fall, including dates for two new Shift events, which are now part of our new company. I’m excited about the work we’re doing, and I hope those of you who’ve followed my journey from Wired through to NewCo will come along for the ride with The Recount. You can sign up for our beta newsletter here. Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your comments and encouragement along the way.

You’re Doing What?! was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More than a few of you have been wondering why I’ve been so quiet here these past few months, and today I can finally reveal at least part of what’s kept me so busy. Today we’re announcing a public beta product from the company I’ve been building with my longtime friend and collaborator John Heilemann and many other talented folks. We’re starting with an email newsletter featuring a new approach to video journalism covering political news. I’ll have more to say soon, but for now, sign up here for our first product, The Recount. I hope you’ll share with friends — and let me know what you think. More soon, I promise, and thanks for reading. (CNN coverage here)

Introducing Recount Media was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I like to keep myself honest when it comes to predictions. Now that six months of 2019 are in the books (well, nearly seven given how intermittent my postings have been this year), it’s time to see how things are tracking.

Regular readers may have noticed I’m not really written much this year. This pains me, but it’s because I’ve been deep in a new project, one focused on a new market and a new media format. There’ll be news on that soon enough, but for now, let’s review my 2019 predictions and see how I’m doing.

First up: 1/ Global warming gets really, really, really real. I predicted that 2019 would be the year that climate change would become impossible to ignore. I’m writing this as more than half the country is suffering from a massive heat wave, and in the first six months of the year, we’ve seen so many extreme weather events, it’s hard to keep track. Floods, draught, monsoons, tornados, the Green New Deal, you name it, it’s all over the news. I think we’re on track for this one, sadly.

#2: Mark Zuckerberg resigns as Chairman of Facebook, and relinquishes his supermajority voting rights. Related, Sheryl Sandberg stays right where she is. Well, so far, not happening. There have been many calls for exactly this, including a shareholder revoltthat went nowhere. There’s still time, but this isn’t trending in the right direction.

#3: Despite a ton of noise and smoke from DC, no significant federal legislation is signed around how data is managed in the United States. This is trending exactly where I thought it would be. Lots and lots of smoke, no fire whatsoever.

#4: The Trump show gets cancelled. Wishful thinking, but so far, not happening. But there’s still time, and I expect the Fall to be quite eventful. And who knows what might come of “Mueller Day” this coming week…

#5: Cannabis for the win. I predicted federal legalization, and while there have been some milestones this year, and many are talking about making it happen, I think I was overconfident here. It’s going to take longer than any of us would like.

#6: China implodes, the world wobbles. If you read the Wall St. Journal, you’d have thought this has already happened. The signs are all there, and I think it’s still entirely possible this will occur this Fall.

#7: 2019 will be a terrible year for financial markets. So far I’ve been utterly wrong. It’s been a great year for stocks! But I think we’re at peak market and most indicators point to…bad news ahead. Trump, of course, will pull every lever he can — including bullying the Fed and claiming victory in his various trade wars — but I think we’re overdue for a correction. Again, let’s wait for the Fall to see what comes of this one.

#8: At least one major tech IPO is pulled, the rest disappoint as a class. Several tech IPOs have been pulled, but none of the bellwethers have been yanked. Uber was a disappointment, but overall, 2019 has been a great year for tech IPOs. The year is not over, and if things go south overall (see #7), I very much doubt tech will be spared.

#9: New forms of journalistic media flourish. I wrote this one because, well, that’s what I’m working on, and so are many other media entrepreneurs. I’ll wait till the end of the year to count them up, but I’m feeling bullish about post-platform media in 2019.

#10: A new “social network” emerges by the end of the year. Tik Tok broke out this year (it launched in 2017), but a Chinese owned meme machine certainly wasn’t what I had in mind. I still think there’s an opening for a new challenger to Facebook, and who knows, it might emerge before the year is up.

So where does that leave me, half a year in? Batting about .500, it seems. I’ll be taking notes as we head toward Dec. 31st. Thanks for reading, and keeping me honest. I hope to be writing a lot more in the coming months.

Six Months In….Are My Predictions Coming True? was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story was originally published at Mediapost.

Developing markets are said to leapfrog whole generations of technology. For example, China leapfrogged the PC generation and went right to mobile. If Tencent executes on its vision shared at its “upfront” event, they will leapfrog the current generation of marketing platforms.

Along with Baidu and Alibaba, Tencent dominates the digital landscape in China. In addition to being the biggest publisher of video games in China, they own or have stakes in a vast ecosystem of apps. With apologies for the crude analogies to U.S. services, the Tencent empire includes:

· WeChat — like Facebook and Whatsapp

· QQ — like Twitter

· Tencent Videos — like YouTube

· WePay — like Apple Pay

· Tencent News — like CNN

· JD.com — like Amazon

· Meituan-Dianping — like Yelp

Tencent said their audience is growing 40% YoY. No small feat on a base where WeChat alone has over 1 billion MAUs.

At the “In Tencent” event on May 10 in Shanghai, the company shared plans to go to the next level. After completing a massive reorganization combining all Tencent’s marketing products in one team, they unveiled the Tencent Data Cloud. This creates detailed, customizable, user profiles derived from across the Tencent ecosystem. This data cloud sits at the heart of their enhanced tech stack connecting adtech to martech to smart retail.

It is easy to take potshots at US TV network upfront presentations. Suffice to say, Tencent’s subject matter was very different. There were no celebrities or discussions of time-bound programming lineups.

The ex-BCG consultants who run Tencent used a giant video wall as a massive white board. They spent three hours mapping out in mind-numbing detail how their end-to-end marketing platform works. In between they presented case study after case study. They weren’t touting “cool” examples of product integration. They showed real ROI metrics, including incrementality and LTV.

The gist of Tencent’s offer is for marketers to simply bring an interesting idea that provides value to users. From there, Tencent will help:

· Build that experience inside their walled garden.

· Tell you who will be interested in your thing and everything about them.

· Source Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) who influence your target.

· Deliver targeted ads with zero waste.

· Use dynamic offers in the payment process to drive conversion.

· Incentivize pass along and advocacy.

· Use its messaging platform to drive repeat engagement.

· Connect to retail partners to track true ROI.

· And drop Machine Learning on top of it all to optimize performance in real time.

They ended by encouraging the audience to stop thinking about merely selling products and focus on monetizing relationships.

As a US-based marketing executive, all I can say is WOW.

The Tencent marketing platform is driving lighting fast brand creation and business growth. All of their case studies were local Chinese brands — there was not a single global brand. On the ground floor of Dentsu Aegis Network’s Shanghai office I noticed a storefront with a line out to the street. A Chinese colleague explained this was a KOL (key opinion leader) who built a following and was partnering with a Chinese food and beverage company to use her and name on a line of milk, tea, and baked goods through a chain of dedicated retail storefronts.

Here in the West, the industry’s conversation is about privacy, fake news, and breaking up monopolies. Tencent did not mention those topics once. China is a society under constant surveillance, has no expectation of privacy, and a tradition of propaganda that blurs lines between ads and editorial. It is hard to bet against Tencent executing their plan locally.

Lest I sound like too much of a breathless fanboy, it should be noted that Tencent’s stock recently popped after the company accepted strict censors from the Chinese Government affecting their video game business. And while returning to our New York office from an Upfront presentation, I had to wade through thousands of Falun Gong members marching down 42nd Street protesting oppression from the Chinese Communist Party. Impressive leapfrog aside, one hates to think of how those users would be profiled and “optimized” in China.

Complexities and all, there is a new data-driven marketing power rising in the East.

China’s Tencent Leapfrogged the Upfronts was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Peter Gibbons worked as a computer programmer at IniTech and he didn’t like his job. OK, let’s be frank. He really hated it. And more than that he despised his management. Well, it’s a small wonder, he reported to eight different bosses.

This misery at the office trickled into his home and his romantic relationship began to unravel. Desperate times called for desperate measures. So Peter Gibbons signed up for an occupational hypnotherapy session.

It went terribly wrong! It was a disaster! The pent-up frustration that Peter brought into the therapy session was too much for the hypnotist to take.

Dr. Swanson collapsed. He suffered a heart attack. He dropped dead right in front of Peter’s eyes.

This was a cathartic experience, as you’d imagine. But also a liberating one for Peter. He finally understood that now was the time to take back control of his life. From that point forward, Peter was no longer prepared to tolerate the oppression of the Office…

Wow! There is a lot of drama in this story! Someone should’ve made a movie out of it. Well, somebody did! The film, Office Space, was released in 1999 and Peter Gibbons spoke for his generation when he said this:

“It’s not that I’m lazy… it’s that I just don’t care!” Peter was referring to his job!

He is a fictional character, but we are real and we want to care, we want our jobs to have meaning, we want to make a difference…

So, what is holding us back? It is outdated ideas! Ideas and the vocabulary we’ve inherited from the industrial age: the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, the command & control logic or running a company.

All of that made a lot of sense in the age of assembly lines and conveyor belts. But we now live in the world of open offices and remote work. Yet those ideas remain a hallmark of a modern enterprise. Those terms are two centuries old, but we are sticking with them for some reason. We have no one to blame but ourselves! And, also, the dictionary.

Our vocabulary is where ideas reside. They get entrenched in the language we use. Let’s take the term manager for example. It’s the linchpin of a hierarchy and it was the bane of Peter’s existence. It is often said that employees join a company, but they leave a manager. A quick google search reveals why

Well… This is really depressing. But, let’s be clear, blaming the manager is not the answer. They are the victims of the same outdated systems, just like the rest of us. Being a cog in a machine isn’t fun regardless of how important a cog one is.

To be fair, most managers I’ve encountered in my life were great. They were competent and they were good at their jobs, and I’m sure the same is true for you. But the problem is that in a command & control structure, the managers are expected to do exactly that: command & control.

For good or for bad, neither command nor control adds that much value to running a successful, innovative enterprise these days. The world has changed since the times the steam engine was invented and ushered in the industrial revolution. There are a few megatrends, which are putting conventional organizational models under serious strain.

The #1 megatrend that’s driving everything else is the accelerating pace of technological development. The social media, the smartphone, the internet, the computer, they have fundamentally reshaped our lives.

But so did the abacus and a printing press. The important distinction is that it took 2,000 years between those major breakthroughs, whereas we’ve experienced a handful in your lifetimes.

What this means is that we can no longer forecast, plan, and execute. In other words, the strategy, as we know it, is dead. But strategy formulation and execution is how managers earn their keep. So if it is gone for good, where does it leave the manager?

Another megatrend to consider is the automation of everything. Some estimates suggest that we could lose as many as 2 billion within a decade! Well, you are right to be skeptical. We are talking about more than half of the jobs that exist today. Such pronouncements have been made with every wave of automation, but what we’ve seen is that some jobs disappear and new ones get invented.

Actually, it doesn’t matter which view you subscribe to, the broad consensus is that all routine work, the tasks that can be parsed out is being outsourced to the machines. Non-standard, creative, experimental work, tasks that require intuition and cross-team collaboration will remain, but it doesn’t naturally lend itself to management. It’s not just the cashless stores and driverless cars, it’s the tasks performed by doctors, lawyers, and teachers.

The robots and algorithms may or may not steal your job, but they will surely take some of the boring and pointless tasks off your plate. And believe me, it’ll be much harder to manage you once you are no longer burdened with routine and repetitive minutia.

What else is happening in the world is that the millennials will soon dominate the global workforce. The millennials have gotten their priorities down. They will not join your firm until you’ve got a ping-pong table, but they’ll sure push the limits of the industrial era thinking. They grew up digital, they understand networks much better than they understand the hierarchy.

Information is power, we all know that. The traditional managers, when they encounter information, will hoard it. But the first instinct of a millennial would be to share it, to become an influencer, an important hub in the network. And, thus, gain a different type of power. Can a rigid hierarchy survive these fundamental shifts in attitudes?

Those 3 megatrends: ever-accelerating pace of technological advancement; the automation of everything, and the millennials coming of age are pushing the traditional manager, literally, out of the door. Some companies are struggling to cope, some take half-measures and that creates apathy, confusion, and distrust; but others are thriving. Steve Jobs was one of the first people to sense the zeitgeist.

I guess that kind of thinking worked out pretty well for Apple, as it became the first public company in the world to reach a $1 trillion valuation.

Another example to consider is a Swedish company called Crisp that has no CEO. It runs as a holacracy, which is a true alternative to Command & Control. No one is in charge. Well, actually, everyone is in charge. Staff is empowered to take responsibility and to make decisions at their level, which happens to be one and only level at Crisp. The authority and decision-making are distributed throughout the organization, rather than being vested in a management hierarchy.

If you believe something needs to be done, you are expected to step up and do it! Others will join in if you are able to make a persuasive pitch. That’s a self-regulating system that filters out bad decisions. The company doesn’t operate on reporting lines but on a set of principles that allows people to collaborate effectively. Crisp is a 40 ppl consulting business, but can it work at scale?
A tech unicorn called Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon for $1.2B, has been operating as a holacracy for the last 4 years.

Surely, the tech startups are experimenting with all kinds of ideas, but what about the good-old-manufacturing? Let me ask you this question, then: what do the refrigerator and YouTube have in common?

If the fridge is made by Haier than the answer is: “quite a lot.”
Haier — the largest appliance maker in the world and it set itself up as a platform.
It operates as an ecosystem of 4,000 micro-enterprises, a dozen employees each. Employees at all levels are directly accountable to the customers, and the company was able to cut the time from concept to market by 70%.
This organizational design Inspired a new term — humanocracy — and there isn’t a lot of space for managers at Haier, but plenty of space for the entrepreneurs.

So, given those three megatrends and the examples of holacracy and humanocracy, could we now say that the era of management is over? Let’s not get carried away. The tech startups get a lot of publicity but remain a tiny fraction of the global economy. There are 3,5 billion people working today, and we know that the majority of jobs don’t require creativity and spontaneity. What they do require are consistency and efficiency.

Bureaucracy may be soul-crushing, but it works, that’s why we stuck with it for so long. Bureaucracy and hierarchy create efficiency at scale. And this has been a winning formula for many successful companies.

A flat structure can be disorienting. And even the companies that have embraced holacracy, admit that it isn’t easy to implement.

We also are status-abscessed creatures, and projecting your status or even knowing what it is could be difficult in the organizations with no official titles.

We, humans, have a peculiar relationship with authority. We really like to defer difficult decisions. So we elevate them to our managers. In that sense, we are vested in the hierarchy even if we resent it. But what has always been true and remains true is that bureaucracy comes with at a cost.

Peter Gibbons was a talented programmer and he told us that he wasn’t lazy, but there was no space for him to make a meaningful contribution. He could only muster about 15 min of real actual work in a given week. Well, I’m certain we all are doing a much better job than Peter. Should we say, about an hour of real actual work on a good day?

So what are we doing the rest of the time? We are busy ticking many boxes and complying with many requirements, operating within the guidelines, waiting for decisions to come down from the top…

We could all contribute a lot more, but instead, we are stuck doing things that add very little value. And guess what, deep in their hearts, the companies where we work want exactly the same thing we wish for. They’d like to give us space to do our best, to bring all of our many talents, to step up. They just don’t know how.

This is clearly a lose-lose situation, and that can’t last.

We are living in the age of disruption. When iPhone was released it almost disrupted Nokia out of business. Netflix has shaken up the movie-making industry to its core. And the next wave of disruption is not about products or services, it is coming for the org-structures.

Can our business vocabulary survive those tectonic shifts? I sure hope NOT. Managers manage, director direct, supervisors supervise, and what do executives do? Execute?! Ok, let’s not go that far.

Every one of those terms symbolizes command & control, but what really matters today is the context in which the teams operate: market context, technology context, regulatory environment, the context of one project vis-a-vis others within the organization.

Let me give you an example. If you were the CEO of a car company a few decades ago, to compete, what you had to do is make better cars, or faster cars, or cheaper cars. The context didn’t matter much. You knew you were an automaker.

Today, if you are an automaker, are you a hardware or a software company? Are you supposed to focus on making better cars and marketing them to individual customers, or start preparing for a self-driving, mobility-as-a service ecosystem based on a subscription model?

Context is everything! And it keeps shifting. We all know that the data is the new oil. And oil has this faculty, it flows. And so does the data. Data is not static. Every business now collects it, we want to be ready for the digital age. And the data helps us define the context, but only at this very moment. Then, the data flows on and the context changes.

What used to be known as muddling through is now called agile, it is the only way for companies to survive disruption, to adjust to the highly volatile context. To lead a project now is not to assign tasks and monitor performance. It is now about understanding and curating context for the team and organically linking its work the rest of the business.

Organizations large and small sense those dynamics and try to infuse the old terms with the new meanings, but the language we use matters. Holacracy and humanocracy are the additions to our vocabulary that offer a real alternative to the hierarchy.

So what I’d like to suggest is that we retire the term manager, and from now on we start hiring context curators.

If we fail to revise the vocabulary, the managers will default to standard managerial behavior even when the organizations are no longer interested in it. Recognizing the accelerated pace of change, we have to shift from strategy to experimentation. Soon there will be nothing left to command & control, because of the automation. So the context curators will have to focus on empowering and mentoring team members. And when the millennials begin to dominate the workplace, hierarchies will have to yield to flexible networks.

The term manager has entered the English language over 4 centuries ago, and it has to do with the old Latin word “manus” — the hand; it has to do with handling things.

Curator, on the other hand, comes from caring and helping. And now we have to come back to Peter Gibbons. Remember, he reported to eight different bosses and really struggled with caring for his job. If only did he work in a team that was led by a context curator!

I don’t know if the era of management is over, but I sure hope that the era of the context curator is about to dawn.

Where Did all The Managers Go? was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The way Open.ai released the results of their recent research was meant to freak us out, and it worked. The A.I. Text Generator That’s Too Dangerous To Make Public provides examples where with very little input, text is generated that is indistinguishable if not better than the quality of this writing. The code wasn’t released for others to inspect and build upon, but it’s likely that comparable models will be in other’s hands soon. If not already.

Automated Messages are coming to social media, and if social media is to survive, it surely will not be in its present form.

There’s a saying, always bet on text as the best medium for social communication. And many have. Social networks, social media, Amazon and Yelp reviews, and many other mediums use text as core to their value. But what happens when the cost to produce a message that seems authentic falls to zero?

All bets are off.

Chamath Palihapitiya on Twitter

Ugh...Via @OpenAI We can also imagine...malicious purposes, including the following: -Generate misleading news articles -Impersonate others online -Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media -Automate the production of spam/phishing content https://t.co/oWL9B8HIc2

Italian philosopher and researcher at CNRS Gloria Orrigi observes since information wants to be free and therefore abundant, we are shifting our relationship to knowledge to rely on reputation:

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know.

She suggests a key is helping people discern the reputational paths.

What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.

We’ve known the need for social media literacy since it started. Howard Rheingold’s research and book Net Smart boils it down to Five Literacies: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or “crap detection”), and network smarts. The problem is literacy doesn’t distribute broadly. And what Hemingway called Crap Detection is about to become very hard, if not expensive.

In the early days of social media and social networks we had Bots & Fakesters, sometimes for fun. Back when Friendster banned Fakesters until they could monetize them, Tribe.net embraced them, real identity was lost as a potential social media primitive. Fakesters became a feature, not a bug.

And you could tell when content was being automatically generated. The firehose of fake would overwhelm the feed. And as commercial and political interests started to dip into the liquidity of attention, astroturfing was easily discernible. Like with spam, the attacks became more sophisticated, and social platforms relationship to Fakesters and good intentions not to censor led to halfhearted countermeasures. The platforms assumed neutral stances as common carriers up until the Russians woke us up.

This was even when it was recognized that content was the object to drive social network growth. The social networks became less conversational, from what are you doing? to what’s happening? on Twitter as a thing.

The move to content carried with it increased personalization, and recommendations, including horrific cases such as when algorithms think you want to die (“Social media platforms not only host this troubling content, they end up recommending it to the people most vulnerable to it.”). The platforms have some serious changes to make for how they target and filter, and some have made laudable moves.

With content came its traditional owners, which gained the DMCA Takedown Notice weapon for which platforms always swiftly comply.

Clay Shirky on Twitter

Today in "Headlines It Would Take 2019 Me An Entire Hour To Explain To 1999 Me": How Kids YouTube Star Blippi Used Copyright Law to Hide His Harlem Shake Poop Video https://t.co/qsxoRy4I6t

The whole situation seems frivolous and absurd, but actually tells us quite a lot about how the internet works and the ways in which people weaponize copyright law to censor, hide things they’d prefer were forgotten, or threaten others.

I’m sharing this strange example to highlight that regulations won’t keep pace with this change either. This year in the US we’ll probably get some good personal privacy protection (somewhere between the EU and California) for our data. That may in-part protect us against the 3rd party targeting of automated messages.

But hyper-targeting is a weapon of the last war, and automated messages may mean a new front. What if you can target someone without a robust behavioral profile, and instead simply counter-message. In a few years we’ll all have our own personal trolls, armed with automated messages. Talking to us at length authentically, initially operator-assisted, and soon the input of our opinions and questions will be enough.

That targeting, btw, doesn’t need the real identity social networks don’t have anyway (save, LinkedIn). There are regulations to fine astroturfers, but in no-way can enforcement keep up with the onslaught, that might even be a good thing if you believe in the 1st Amendment.

In this cowardly new world, the counter-measure may be giving people the tools to defend themselves. Platforms that provide the path for automated messages must be responsible for revealing their reputational paths. And perhaps Open.ai should release the models so toolmakers can empower people to create their own automated messages. So you can respond to your personalized trolls personally with the same convenience they have.

Comments are open, and I for one, welcome them.

A.I. Will Kill Social Media As We Know It was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Despite waves of privacy concerns, Facebook has a powerful grip on us all. The ubiquity of the platform and the time invested in building connections deters people from leaving and in turn deters would-be rivals from building alternative platforms. Their scale and success has us locked in. This success has an Achilles heel though — and it’s your mom.

Metcalfe’s Law essentially describes how networks grow exponentially not incrementally in value with the addition of nodes or users. When you add one node to a network of a million, there are potentially a million new connections not one. The law addresses the technological and quantitative side of networks but ignores the qualitative value of networks. The Network Effect is fundamental to the power of social media networks, however they are fraught with human complexity too. A network with 10 of your close friends is worth much more than a network of 1000 strangers.

There are many reasons why Instagram is growing while the main Facebook platform is declining in places. The cleaner product features and visual nature of the posts are key factors, but so is the age of the network and its users.

When I joined Facebook in its infancy, everyone invited everyone to connect. I’m connected to an exhaustive list of my high school, university and early career peers. When I joined Instagram, years later, I was more selective. It’s become a more meaningful network for me as it offers more relevant engagements with close friends. In a sense, rebuilding my contacts there (which was relatively easy as it was already owned by Facebook then) was like spring cleaning. When I look at my teenage nieces’ Instagram accounts though, they are again connected to thousands of their school peers. There’s a high likelihood their Instagram accounts will eventually be stuck to 2019 the way my Facebook account is stuck in 2009.

Social networks grow stale.

Our personal networks — the connections we build on social media platforms — age and degrade over time as we go through phases in our lives and as the platforms themselves evolve. Many of my connections have largely withdrawn from Facebook activity while my parents and their friends have found it a great tool to keep tabs on the family and grandkids. Some of my parent’s peers have connected with me. Can you really say no to uncle whats-his-name? Unfortunately though, he is not very internet savvy and generally shares low quality content and smatterings of misinformation.

When you add a node to a network it grows quantitatively. When a user adds a connection on a social network there is a quantitative impact and a qualitative one. You are likely to add your favorite people early and as time passes you move further from there. As you continue to build, diminishing marginal returns set it. Eventually, If one’s network grows so big and impersonal, negative marginal returns can set it — where with the addition of a contact you lose more than you gain. Now, the value of the network effect has been completely outweighed by the qualitative degradation.

Facebook benefits from the asymmetry of being a media company that does not produce content. It’s users create and propel the content. They are both the audience and the authors. It always made sense for them to grow to cover as much of humanity as possible — They are currently just shy of one third. With this massive scale though, the platform has become like the telephone directory of the internet, where much of the activity has shallowed to light or functional interaction and dodging your grandparents.

Compounding the natural aging of personal networks is the inevitable increase in advertising as user growth slows. Any ad driven media platform must trade off its user experience with business performance. Eventually, to make more money they must run more ads. Balancing this is critical for any service that is predicated on being ‘social’. Declining personal interactions, coupled with increasing commercial messaging is a double edged sword that will accelerate a platform’s lifecycle.

Eventually someone will pitch a replacement to Facebook where users must rebuild their network and it’s going to stick — where the upside of a better product outweighs the downside of having to rebuild. The sunk costs will be written off.

It’s becoming easier by the day to imagine a better platform product than Facebook. Consider this hypothetical pitch:

“We’re building an alternative to Facebook that won’t be ad funded, so there won’t be constant pressure to compromise your personal data. Our focus will be on making social truly social again, promoting quality content and looking after people’s wellbeing. You are invited to join the Beta.”

Increasingly it looks like Facebook’s key challenge in the future will not be the journey of a primary platform but rather managing the rise and fall of different platform products, migrating users and avoiding interception. If Instagram replaces Facebook, that’s fine. What will replace Instagram though and will it be theirs?

Facebook is not going away soon but as its users’ personal networks age, its challenges and business will change rapidly.

The Anti-Network Effect was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In July of 2017, I wrote an article on Medium that NewCo published entitled What It’s Like to Be a Woman at a Tech Conference. When it was first posted, it went viral, and the blank faced image of me giving a thumbs up in the middle of a crowded wine cave full of men (taken by a coworker at a tech conference in Napa) became a well-known symbol of women in tech. Over the last couple years, folks have recognized me at conferences I speak at and say things like “you’re the girl from that article!” all over the world (London, Vancouver, Italy, Atlanta, Kansas City — you get the point), and someone once shared with me that the thumbs-up image became a Slack emoji reaction for their engineering teams. I’ve been incredibly moved by men and women thanking me for the perspective and sharing my insight into what it’s like to function as a gender minority in the software engineering world. If you’re unfamiliar with my brand, I’m a quirky white girl who wears bows in her hair, loves pink glittery things, owns too many enamel lapel pins, and has a bit of a LaCroix obsession; a stark contrast from your typical male engineer in a Patagonia jacket who studied computer science at Stanford (in fact, I have a theatre degree).

These days I work at Microsoft as a Developer Advocate. If you’re unfamiliar with Developer Relations, I’ll give you the TLDR: Typically, I have described my role as a “liaison between customers and engineers”, or “an extroverted engineer” (only partially true for me, as I’m an ambivert). My job involves using my engineering skills to help educate other developers how to do things well with Microsoft’s tools (I also do fun hacking on Furby dolls sometimes, and make fun Android apps - it’s a pretty sweet gig). In a way, working as a Developer Advocate involves being a public face for an engineering tool/brand/product- its equal parts marketing/branding/engineering/ educating. I often keynote at conferences in other countries, speak at local Bay Area meet-ups, and get to meet a lot of cool smart people around the world.

On Friday January 11th, 2019, I had just hopped into an Uber home and began to browse Twitter. My notifications were normal for the most part- some friends tagging me in RuPaul’s Drag Race memes, followers asking “Will you be at [insert tech conference here] this year??”, and some likes on a post I had made earlier about Furby hacking. To set the stage, I’m by no means “a celebrity”, but I’ve had a tweet of me posing in an empty women’s restroom go viral (not as sexy as it sounds - see below), and I’ve been known to do a #ad campaign or two for ModCloth or other techy/nerdy clothing companies in the past. I love social media (maybe a little too much, according to the Digital Wellness app on my Pixel), and I often use Twitter and Instagram as a platform to share my experience as a woman in tech. Much to my friends’ dismay - I keep my DMs open. I’ve gotten many amazing speaking opportunities through my DMs, and have met some amazing friends from Twitter in real life.

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

Hey ladies, come work in tech. We have no bathroom lines 🚽💁🏼‍♀️

So, when I received a tweet that said something along the lines of “@ChloeCondon is this you?!” that day, I almost didn’t click it…

Sometimes, I’m unable to check all my notifications and DMs - especially on this particular day where I had been in several coffee meetings across town and hadn’t had much downtime on my phone. I originally assumed the link would take me to yet another BitCoin/Crypto/Blockchain article that I had been tagged in (you can read more here about that ridiculousness, or you can watch the 1st seven minutes of this keynote I gave at DjangoCon in 2018). But as I opened the link into Instagram and began to read the caption/comments, my blood began to boil.

As you can see from the image, some person I had never met or heard of named “Tee Medlin” had posted the well known image of me from my 2017 article with a caption saying I was stalking him. I scanned the comments, mouthed “What the FUCK?” several times, and raced up the stairs to my apartment to hop on WiFi and tweet about it.

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

Wow. I've been harassed online before, but @teemedlin- I have no idea who you are, nor was I at a conference/meet-up/event w/ you 4 days ago. Lying about this is next level- also, ++ photo is from my @NewCo article I published years ago/from a conference 3 years ago.

Here’s the crazy part- the pure happenstance of the situation is insane to comprehend. Someone who follows me on Twitter, who had read my article at some point, saw a man he knows from North Carolina on his feed, saw the Instagram post featuring my image, and tweeted it to me because he recognized it and thought it was odd. Tee Medlin’s Instagram account has since been deleted (it’s unclear if this was done by him, or the fine engineers over at Instagram). I think that if the stars hadn’t aligned, and if the acquaintance of Tee who found the image hadn’t tweeted this to me, AND I hadn’t by chance took the time to click/look at the link, all of Tee’s behavior would have gone completely unnoticed. My photo would have sat there, along with the “funny” comments and likes until the internet/planet get destroyed someday. The amount serendipity of the situation is difficult to comprehend.

Seth Rogen on Twitter

@ChloeCondon This dude is nuts.

But here we are 2 days and several tweets from Seth Rogen later (there’s a whole thing with a wax statue… it’s hard to explain - just read the thread). Ok, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here is the Twitter thread for folks to catch up who haven’t. It’s full of twists and turns, and several rabbit hole threads for you to go down. Would suggest sitting down with a nice glass of Merlot and diving in for an hour:

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

Wow. I've been harassed online before, but @teemedlin- I have no idea who you are, nor was I at a conference/meet-up/event w/ you 4 days ago. Lying about this is next level- also, ++ photo is from my @NewCo article I published years ago/from a conference 3 years ago.

And no, this isn’t some hacker dude in a basement trying to get credit card info from the elderly (although, it looks like Tee dabbled in some shady business himself - one can find this with a simple Google search of his name). I know there’s lots of “Russian bot” chatter these days, but this is a real-life human man who has faked an entire life for over 5 years. I can assure you, this isn’t artificial intelligence or machine learning - as I said in the recent Mashable article, “However, if I’m wrong, and this is very good AI- congrats to whoever built it because this is groundbreaking work, my friend.”

If you came here for a write-up/breakdown of the thread featuring top secret messages from his friends/acquaintances that DMed me, you can stop reading here. Unfortunately, many folks online have been posting personal information about Mr. Medlin, and I do not condone threats against him or his family in any way. Though I have sufficient cause to believe this is not a hacked account, and that this took some serious time/effort to create such a deep rabbit hole of an online life, I in no way want to ruin this guy’s life. He is likely an individual who is unstable and needs treatment. He has suffered enough, and I am grateful to be given an opportunity now to shed some light on my perspective of this situation as a woman in tech, and a woman on the internet.

matt vogt on Twitter

@shahedC @ajlburke @ChloeCondon Really, she's been at this since the beginning. Photo evidence.

While some days on the internet are great, there are are certainly days it becomes a garbage fire. This week’s Twitter adventure, however wasn’t a garbage fire. It was a burning garbage truck that crashed into a gas station — then volunteers put out the fire and my faith in humanity was restored… until the flame started up again and we realized that this fire was bigger than all of us could have ever imagined.

From this experience, I think there are many lessons to be learned. For one, never believe anything you see online. There are already many blogs, books, and films that have already touched on the dangers of looking too deeply into others’ social media presence (Ingrid Goes West does a great job of illustrating this, if you’ve never seen i t- highly recommend 🎬). What we put online is a highlight reel - no one is posting about how badly their break-up is going, how they don’t understand taxes/401k, or how they have a bunch of unpaid parking tickets (ok, except maybe that one crazy high school friend you still follow who is now in a pyramid scheme and ties it all back to Herbalife, but I digress).

Secondly, I’ve learned that while the internet can be awful and insane sometimes, there are truly good people out there as well. The amount of folks, many complete strangers, who helped do all this detective work, commented words of support, and DMed me to check-in on my personal safety and mental health has been amazing and I am thankful. I gained about 5k followers in 2 days, only 2 of which said not-so-nice things. Not a bad average for Twitter for once (although, to be fair, I didn’t get to see every notification as this thing blew up online - so who knows 😅).

Shahed Chowdhuri @ Microsoft on Twitter

@mattvogt @ajlburke @ChloeCondon OMG you're right... here's @ChloeCondon during the founding of America...

And third, and most importantly, that sometimes being a woman on the internet can be a full-time job. As I mentioned before, my role as a Developer Advocate involves a lot content creation, face-to-face interaction, and requires me to have an online social presence. In the past, I’ve dealt with everything from men commenting on online videos of me saying I should “get a tan”, I’ve been DMed creepy messages on Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram/etc. with messages like “hi”, “nice smile you got there”, and “your beautiful” (I usually respond “ *you’re ”, on that last one), and have even stumbled upon entire forum posts about me and how as a woman with a non-traditional background I’m unqualified to work in tech. Over the last three years, I have learned to brush it off and I almost always “never read the comments” if I know they’re negative (in fact, I have a necklace and pin of the mantra). But these things add up.

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

When you're a woman on the internet and post an opinion... https://t.co/BMYEqotDdD

In the past, I’ve dealt with this type of harassment with comedy, and a healthy combination of empathy, compassion, and “sick burns”. When I was fed up with getting creepy DMs, I began sending Avengers spoilers to men:

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

🚨⚠️PSA⚠️🚨: ANY FUTURE DUDES WHO JUST DM ME "hi" OR GET CREEPY WITH ME, ILL SEND SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR 💁🏼‍♀️ YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

However, not every woman is like me. Not every woman online feels comfortable calling these things out. Not every woman has the online social network that I have. Cyber bullying and online harassment are so common these days that at a certain point I stopped reacting to the amount of inbound variations of “hey ur hott”s I get any given week. In the past, people have recommended I change my profile picture image to a cartoon/drawing, not have open DMs, and list my boyfriend in my Twitter bio. And to that I say “I like how I look”, “I get many professional opportunities in my DMs”, and “lol what is this MySpace? I’m not wasting character count on my relationship status”. But doing so creates more work, and requires more emotional energy to manage.

Derek K on Twitter

@ChloeCondon @codehitchhiker I don't know the context to this so I may be missing something but as someone who has never been complimented on his looks kinda hurts to have someone complain about being called cute

Ok, before a fine gentleman comments something similar to “Pooooooor Chloe- she gets sooooo many compliments” below - don’t. And if you think sending such messages is “fine” and “not creepy”, I hate to break it to you- it is. Twitter is not a dating site. Neither is Instagram. And especially not LinkedIn. Being a woman online means responding to and ignoring these types of messages, and rolling your eyes at men who actually use the phrase “well, actually” to make sure sure you know that they know things better than you do. It’s obnoxious and incredibly common. Sometimes I completely refrain from posting a strong opinion online, or take extra time to carefully craft a tweet in such a way that the “well, actually” squad doesn’t make an attack. I wish I was joking, but sadly- I’m not. Being a woman on the internet can be terrible sometimes.

Unfortunately, me writing this article isn’t going to fix things overnight. We have a very long way to go until this awful behavior towards women online stops (and let’s face it- it likely never will). But I’m writing this article to shed light on an issue I think most folks (especially men) don’t see a whole lot of since it’s often behind-the-scenes and often only seen by the women who receive them and their partners/close friends. The creepy DMs, the gross messages from dudes on LinkedIn, the blog comments, and the “well actually”s on our tweets add up. It needs to stop.

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

Quick update- dude who DMed me telling me I had a nice smile has now messaged me thanking me 4 being a part of a social experiment in which he was trying to prove that I'd be more upset if a white male DMed me...

Obviously, the lovely blokes who send/write/post this kind of trash are likely not reading this article. But for the dudes out there who are angry and want to do something about it, I’ll say this: call out this behavior if you see it happening. Now, I’m not suggesting you “feed the trolls” and come to our rescue in the comments section, but I’m saying we need to teach our friends, children, colleagues, and loved ones not to do this.

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

Well, this is a new one: an engineer at @awscloud (he linked to his LinkedIn in his profile) DMed me on Instagram and asked me out IN A DM. Leave 👏 women 👏 on 👏 the 👏 internet 👏 alone 👏.

Additionally, I would encourage everyone (yes, even women) to take a step back and be aware of how you are engaging with folks online. Are you using a condescending tone? Should you start out a DM with “hey Chloe I’d love some advice on Azure for my team - let’s chat” vs. just a creepy ominous “hey”? Is what you’re about to write necessary? Hurtful? I think we can all stand to be a little more aware of our actions online. I’ve certainly said some not-so-nice things in the past in a fit of frustration. But hey- there’s always the “delete” button… and the ability to apologize.

Chloe Condon 🎀 on Twitter

Can't tell if this is better/worse than the weekly "hi", "nice smile you got there", or "hey beautiful" DMs I get. 😑 I just don't understand the thought process. Go 2 a bar, get Tindr, buy tix to a singles cruise. Just stay the fuck outta my DMs- I'm busy taking over the world.

So what’s next? I don’t know gang. I know that I’ll continue to be an advocate for women in tech and speak out about these issues. I also know that change isn’t coming any time soon when it comes to internet trolls. What I do know, however, is that while the internet has its fair share of garbage humans, it also has some wonderful supportive humans that restore my faith in humanity daily. So, thank you friends- and keep fighting the good internet fight.

Nolite te online trolls carborundorum, y’all 💋 xoxo Chloe

P.S. If you’d like to commemorate the rabbit-hole/clusterf@ck Twitter thread, and want to support Girls Who Code- please consider buying a t-shirt here: https://www.customink.com/fundraising/thumbs-up-for-girls-who-code

What It’s Like to Be A Woman On the Internet was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If predictions are like baseball, I’m bound to have a bad year in 2019, given how well things went the last time around. And given how my own interests, work life, and physical location have changed of late, I’m not entirely sure what might spring from this particular session at the keyboard.

But as I’ve noted in previous versions of this post (all 15 of them are linked at the bottom), I do these predictions in something of a fugue state — I don’t prepare in advance. I just sit down, stare at a blank page, and start to write.

So Happy New Year, and here we go.

1/ Global warming gets really, really, really real. I don’t know how this isn’t the first thing on everyone’s mind already, with all the historic fires, hurricanes, floods, and other related climate catastrophes of 2018. But nature won’t relent in 2019, and we’ll endure something so devastating, right here in the US, that we won’t be able to ignore it anymore. I’m not happy about making this prediction, but it’ll likely take a super Sandy or a king-sized Katrina to slap some sense into America’s body politic. 2019 will be the year it happens.

2/ Mark Zuckerberg resigns as Chairman of Facebook, and relinquishes his supermajority voting rights. Related, Sheryl Sandberg stays right where she is. I honestly don’t see any other way Facebook pulls out of its nosedive. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, so I will just summarize: Facebook’s only salvation is through a new system of governance. And I mean that word liberally — new governance of how it manages data across its platform, new governance of how it works with communities, governments, and other key actors across its reach, and most fundamentally, new governance as to how it works as a corporate entity. It all starts with the Board asserting its proper role as the governors of the company. At present, the Board is fundamentally toothless.

3/ Despite a ton of noise and smoke from DC, no significant federal legislation is signed around how data is managed in the United States. I know I predicted just a few posts ago that 2019 will be the year the tech sector has to finally contend with Washington. And it will be…but in the end, nothing definitive will emerge, because we’ll all be utterly distracted by the Trump show (see below). Because of this, unhappily, we’ll end up governed by both GDPR and California’s homespun privacy law, neither of which actually force the kind of change we really need.

4/ The Trump show gets cancelled. Last year, I said Trump would blow up, but not leave. This year, I’m with Fred, Trump’s in his final season. We all love watching a slow motion car wreck, but 2019 is the year most of us realize the car’s careening into a school bus full of our loved ones. Donald Trump, you’re fired.

5/ Cannabis for the win. With Sessions gone and politicians of all stripes looking for an easy win, Congress will pass legislation legalizing cannabis. Huzzah!!!! Just in time, because…

6/ China implodes, the world wobbles. Look, I’m utterly out of my depth here, but something just feels wrong with the whole China picture. Half the world’s experts are warning us that China’s fusion of capitalism and authoritarianism is already taking over the world, and the other half are clinging to the long-held notion that China’s approach to nation building is simply too fragile to withstand democratic capitalism’s demands for transparency. But I think there may be other reasons China’s reach will extend its grasp: It depends on global growth and optimistic debt markets. And both of those things will fail this year, exposing what is a marvelous but unsustainable experiment in managed markets. This is a long way of backing into a related prediction:

7/ 2019 will be a terrible year for financial markets. This is the ultimate conventional wisdom amongst my colleagues in SF and NY, even though I’ve seen plenty of predictions that Wall St. will have a pretty good year. I have no particular insight as to why I feel this way, it’s mainly a gut call: Things have been too good, for too long. It’s time for a serious correction.

8/ At least one major tech IPO is pulled, the rest disappoint as a class. Uber, Lyft, Slack, Pinterest et al are all expected this year. But it won’t be a good year to go public. Some will have no choice, but others may simply resize their businesses to focus on cash flow, so as to find a better window down the road.

9/ New forms of journalistic media flourish. It’s well past time those of us in the media world take responsibility for the shit we make, and start to try significant new approaches to information delivery vehicles. We have been hostages to the toxic business models of engagement for engagement’s sake. We’ll continue to shake that off in various ways this year — with at least one new format taking off explosively. Will it have lasting power? That won’t be clear by year’s end. But the world is ready to embrace the new, and it’s our jobs to invest, invent, support, and experiment with how we inform ourselves through the media. Related, but not exactly the same…

10/A new “social network” emerges by the end of the year. Likely based on messaging and encryption (a la Signal or Confide), the network will have many of the same features as the original Facebook, but will be based on a paid model. There’ll be some clever new angle — there always is — but in the end, it’s a way to manage your social life digitally. There are simply too many pissed off and guilt-ridden social media billionaires with the means to launch such a network — I mean, Insta’s Kevin Systrom, WhatsApp’s Jan and Brian, not to mention the legions of mere multi-millionaires who have bled out of Facebook’s battered body of late.

So that’s it. On a personal note, I’ll be happily busy this year. Since moving to NY this past September, I’ve got several new projects in the works, some still under wraps, some already in process. NewCo and the Shift Forum will continue, but in reconstituted forms. I’ll keep up with my writing as best I can; more likely than not most of it will focus the governance of data and how its effect our national dialog. Thanks, as always, for reading and for your emails, comments, and tweets. I read each of them and am inspired by all. May your 2019 bring fulfillment, peace, and gratitude.

Cross posted from our open web site.

Previous predictions:

Predictions 2018

2018: How I Did

Predictions 2017

2017: How I Did

Predictions 2016

2016: How I Did

Predictions 2015

2015: How I Did

Predictions 2014

2014: How I Did

Predictions 2013

2013: How I Did

Predictions 2012

2012: How I Did

Predictions 2011

2011: How I Did

Predictions 2010

2010: How I Did

2009 Predictions

2009 How I Did

2008 Predictions

2008 How I Did

2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did

2006 Predictions

2006 How I Did

2005 Predictions

2005 How I Did

2004 Predictions

2004 How I Did

Predictions 2019: Climate, Tech, Trump, Facebook, and…Weed. was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.