Writer as Technoactivist
02:32 PM – There’s something to the phrase “writer as technoactivist” that is appealing as we inch towards the 2030s. The word activism has gone sour for me, because it’s a stand-in for laziness, whining, and opinions. But there’s a history of technological activism that goes back to the 1980s and still continues today. I guess there was always a limit on what could be achieved through open-source software movements compared to market hounds. But if AI makes the cost of building things irrelevant, and any “revolutionary” suddenly has a 100-person “workforce” at their whims, then there might be a rise of new kinds of founder-driven institutes with missions you’d never see in the 2000s-2020s. Up until now, there was a fixed band of company types: unicorns, a $10-100m business for VC, a $1m narrowly-optimized market niche business, or a side passion.Feels like we’re entering an exciting new moment where mission-drive people can scale in ways that weren’t possible before.