Quotes from 2026

If you don’t have a witness, your past starts to feel fictional.

If you know how to make people that happy, you know how to make them miserable as shit. Whatever this island world could be, take it away. If they want nature, make them look at screens. If they like quiet, make the world noisy. If they want community, split them up. If they want time to think, interrupt them all the fucking time. If they want real human companionship, tempt them with artificial matchbox-and-bead FantailPals.

This is the pattern of the rule of salt. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.

The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are.

A lot of adult life consists of staying in character, even when you no longer want to.

Every neighborhood has layers of microculture. Secrets, argot, history, dynasties, shortcuts, inside jokes. Incredible stuff that someone from the outside would never know about.

One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating a bubble in which loyalty is rewarded above all else.

It will, to be clear, be a transition: UI isn’t just about how to use a computer, it also, as Benedict Evans noted on a recent Interview, embeds critical aspects of how a business works. Open-ended text prompts in particular are a terrible replacement for a well-considered UI button that both prompts the right action and ensures the right thing happens. That’s why it’s the agent space that will be the one to watch: what workflows will transition from UI to AI, and thus from a thick client architecture to a thin one? Current workflows are TBD; future workflows seem inevitable.

But what else can he do? This is the problem with not having a real job; when you want to look for another one, nobody knows what you’ve done. His only currency is in the people who interacted with him directly.

Think of it as an eight-dimensional onion.’ Justine straightened her back and gave her father an exasperated look. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s helpful. I always think in those terms, it really helps a lot.