In short: a technologist is anyone who exercises agency to shape technologies toward their goals. It’s a mindset, not a job title; an orientation, if you will. It includes many software engineers and founders, of course, but also makers of home-cooked apps and clever Zapier workflows, hacktivists and traffic cam artists.

If LLMs can now ace the IMO, why not make them president and CEO too? They should run the institutions, not us. Relatedly: the idea that Mars colonization or Cluely or whatever is some kind of natural, inevitable endpoint to humanity; that regardless of whether a product is something we want, there is a moral duty to bring it into existence—to enac... See more

And as I’ve spent more time reporting on Silicon Valley culture this year, one of the trends I’ve been most surprised and disturbed to observe is not merely a shift to the right, but the emergence of a nihilism about whether tech should serve humans at all.