Playbooks

While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you... See more

Kate Moss is the odd supermodel out in the 90s. By comparison she has low fluency because her features are idiosyncratic and harder to understand. Kate’s eyes are feline, she’s angular and jaunty and so our brain is working harder to understand what is going on, but we become beguiled by the differences rather than the similarities and we find a... See more

The group had hit a snag.

It was a familiar sticking point. One they’d run into before. Same disagreement, different day. Competing priorities, different theories about how their business actually runs. It felt like there was a fracture in the room. Subtle but familiar.

There were heads shaking; mutterings to their neighbour; talking past each... See more

We're navigating the early stages of an AI revolution that's rewriting the rules faster than we can learn them. The business landscape I thought I understood twelve months ago is unrecognizable now. The strategies that worked, the assumptions that held, the paths that seemed obvious, are all scrambled.

In this environment, my usual laser focus is a... See more

Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook)

But the subtext is plain: a world built on networks is not one that can be governed by Enlightenment values. Rationality, equality, deliberation, these are ideals of the linear age. The network obeys different laws.