What makes the AI chatbots and agents feel light and clean, here and now in 2026? Is it an innate architectural resistance to advertising, to attention hacks, to adversarial crud? No — it’s that they are simply new! The language models in 2026 are Google in 1999, Twitter in 2009. Their vast conjoined industry of influence hasn’t yet arisen … though it is stirring.In other words, the companies that control these programs can’t let them be free forever. Then the great enshittification begins. Here’s Robin again, on the “magic circle” no AI can cross: that of actually functioning in the real world. The main reason we feel that AI will turn the world upside-down is that, for twenty-five years or so, we’ve spent most of our time on the computer. [I like the title: “the rhinoceros, the anchovy, the Joshua tree.”] AI doesn’t actually affect the physical world that much. Hence, my laissez faire attitude towards it. Also, Robin points out that the digital revolution hasn’t resulted in huge advances in productivity, not compared to the industrial revolution. As I said to Tara the other day, we could still go back to the pre-internet age and not have lost much. Anyway, lots to chew on in Robin’s post. Alan Jacobs:
the arrival of AI slop machines like Suno will dramatically accelerate something that’s already well underway, the widening chasm between live music and recorded music. When musicians recorded live in studio, the gap between that and live performance was very small; now it’s vast and getting vaster. And as Adam says, people will always want to experience live music — and perhaps will value it all the more because of the contrast to an increasingly slop-dominated world of recordings.