The 1990s commercial internet is often remembered through a nostalgic lens, but viewing it strictly as a technological playground obscures the brilliant and sometimes ruthless business engineering happening beneath the surface.

To understand why a company like Chipcom matters today, look back at the economic psyche of the early 1990s. While a brutal white-collar recession left traditional corporate America drowning in a sea of beige cubicles, mass layoffs, and bureaucratic stagnation, technology emerged as a vibrant, neon-lit escape hatch. For a generation desperate to avoid the monotonous climb of traditional corporate hierarchies, tech wasn't just a career path—it was a cultural rebellion fueled by raw meritocracy, fast-paced innovation, and the physical thrill of building the future.

Why synthetic intimacy is a governance problem

We keep debating whether people can have relationships with AI. That debate is missing the party with the most power.

What does a literary dispute between Joyce Carol Oates and Emily Wilson have to do with AI ethics and governance? More than it first appears. The disagreement exposes a category problem: our growing inability to distinguish criticism from intellectual contempt, and either of those from taste. AI did not create that problem. But AI-mediated systems can formalize it.

In public discourse, preference is often presented as judgment, confidence as evidence, and contempt as expertise. In institutional systems, the consequences are more serious: a model output can become a fact, an inference can become a record, and a ranking can become a decision without anyone stopping to ask what kind of claim is actually being made. That is a governance problem.

AI governance is not abstract. It shows up in the résumé that never reaches a human being, the school platform that no one can explain, the benefits form that rejects someone without a conversation, and the score that quietly narrows the options available.

My guest editorial for Leadership & Organization Development Journal is now out: “The Architecture of Accountability: Algorithmic Autonomy and the Discipline of Stewardship.”

The core argument is simple:
Leaders are not outside the systems they authorize.
When institutions fund, scale, and benefit from AI systems, complexity cannot become an alibi when harm appears.

The control room is not empty.

JD Vance’s Catholic conversion sounds like a small demographic footnote: according to Pew, converts to Catholicism account for just 1.5% of U.S. adults.

But small groups can carry large signals.

Catholic converts attend Mass at higher rates than cradle Catholics, are more likely to lean Republican, and are choosing the church at a time when Catholicism is losing far more inherited members than it gains.

That makes this more than a religion story. It is a story about chosen identity, institutional longing, and the strange American habit of treating affiliation as evidence of seriousness.

A conversion can be sincere and still socially useful. It can be spiritually meaningful and still signal order, hierarchy, discipline, belonging, and relief from the exhausting buffet of modern identity.

As a German-born cradle Lutheran who later went to Catholic school, I come by my guilt honestly—and then, apparently, sought continuing education.

So the deeper question is not simply why people convert.

It is whether our affiliations are deepening conscience, or teaching us to accept smaller humiliations in exchange for a better seat at the table.

The real topic isn’t AI. It’s institutional metabolism.

Every organization has a way of converting people into throughput. Some do it politely, with performance reviews and dashboards. Others do it with cages and deportation paperwork. The forms vary; the function is remarkably consistent: the system keeps moving by offloading its friction onto someone else’s body, time, reputation, or future.

AI accelerates that metabolism. It expands the system’s ability to act at scale without direct contact, and therefore without direct accountability. When the harm comes, it arrives as a paperwork artifact: a “match,” a “risk score,” a “process.”

The reason her essay lingers with people, one participant mentioned it “haunted” her, is that modern harm is rarely theatrical. It’s administrative. It’s denial wrapped in procedure. It’s violence in the language of efficiency.

Every field eventually reaches a moment when one of its founding figures begins speaking in a different register. Not necessarily a different idea. A different tone.

Recently, the usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen published a long reflection on AI and the future of UX work. On the surface, it reads like a technical forecast. AI coding is accelerating. Design tools are improving. Exponential scaling will smooth out today’s weaknesses. The familiar workflow of usability engineering (i.e., manual testing, heuristic evaluation, iterative design) may soon be automated away.

The awards ceremony wasn’t broadcast live. The BBC aired it with a two-hour delay, meaning this was not an unfiltered moment that simply “happened” to viewers. It was an edited broadcast. Edited broadcasts are not neutral; they reflect human judgment, priorities, and power. Both the original and the aired version had "inappropriate shoutouts.” Producers cut Akinola Davies Jr., saying “Free Palestine,” making it unmistakably clear that editorial intervention was underway. Choices were made. Among those choices, the N-word shouted at two Black actors remained. That is not neutrality. That is a decision, and decisions like that deserve scrutiny.

Was it malice or incompetence?

Byte magazine artist Robert Tinney, who illustrated the birth of PCs, dies at 78. The significance of this obituary isn’t just “a beloved illustrator died.” It’s that a major piece of the public imagination of early personal computing has just formally passed into history. Tinney helped invent the visual language of personal computing.