The systems claiming to read our preferences increasingly control the conditions under which t…

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Believe it or not, the interesting thing about AI and culture is not whether a model can write a passable scene, generate a passable image, fake a passable campaign idea, or produce a passable treatment for a streaming thriller about a woman with secrets.

Of course it can.

We should actually be talking about the fr…

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On the back of last week’s Tony Awards (no, I don’t believe you watched it either) we’re updating a piece from last Septem…

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The premise is simple.

Before everyone spends a week saying things like “challenging …

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At this point, I’m averaging 20 to 25 AI keynotes a year, split between public stages and private rooms. The job teaches you something quickly: the panic is the same in both places, but only one version is allo…

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I have spent the past few weeks on the road, which is to say in rooms.

Actual rooms. Beverly Hills, where we launched the US version of FUTURES,…

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Last year, after TED, I wrote a piece called The Upload Happens Bit by Bit. It was a threshold piece for me (not least of which because I wrote from a personal point of view… which I almost never do). I tried to name the strange way change arrives before…

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People are asking whether Netflix can make podcasts work. Fair question. It’s just smaller than the important one hiding inside the data. What the early numbers really illuminate is not about…

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Still, one small breach of protocol.

This week I was appointed Global CEO of Allied Global Marketing, a nearly forty-year-old company spanning entertainment, gaming, sport a…

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So. A few weeks ago in a Senate hearing, Netflix accidentally let slip a subscriber number they don’t report on anymore. Ted Sarandos was asked how many US…

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Today: We’re living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This time we’re not automating factories, we’re automating cognition: writing, music, images, even selection. Each time a new machine reorganises life, culture answers with a r…

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It is difficult to digest a news cycle that has moved past “product launches” and into the messy, rapid birth of a new digital ecology (the “AI diffusion” I’ve argued is the core lens for 2026). In December, we reached a staggering tipping point: for the first time in history, there is now more AI-generated content being pumped onto the internet than human content. The dead internet theory is no longer a fringe conspiracy; it is a statistical reality.

But we aren’t finished. For seventy years, software was a hammer. This week, the hammer started deciding which nails to hit and drafting the blueprints for the next house. We have moved from an internet of humans and tools to an internet of AI actors.

This week alone felt like the moment the scaffolding for a new reality was bolted into place (as predicted). Because the volume of change is currently “everything, everywhere, all at once,” I’m opting for a triage format: What happened, Why it matters, and What it means. (Oversimplifying the structure is the only way my own brain can make sense of it.)

Honestly, just writing this has been a struggle, not for lack of news, but for the sheer weight of the intersectional impacts. What follows is my best effort to deliver the view from the scaffolding across the five most important shifts of the last ten days. Shifts that I believe have changed the internet, and the nature of work, forever.

We will be diving deep into:

1. The Rise of the Agent Layer: Why the internet is bifurcating into a “spectator mode” for humans and a high-speed transaction layer for bots.

2. The Death of the Junior Dev: How “vibe coding” went from a meme to a legitimate labour event that is snapping the bottom rungs of the career ladder.

3. The Cannibalisation of SaaS: Why the biggest names in AI just walked into law school and why the “specialised software” you pay for is about to become a mere feature.

4. AI Is Disrupting Jobs Most Severely in the UK: A look at the hard data from the UK that proves which jobs are actually being “compressed” first (and why the UK is a warning for the global services economy).

5. The Crisis of Statecraft: Why the move from “innovation” to “national security” is the final signal that AI has stopped being a product and started being an infrastructure we aren’t yet ready to govern.

1. The agent internet arrived and humans are optional

What happened

A strange little site called Moltbook went viral, and it feels like a digital zoo where the humans are the ones behind the glass. On Moltbook, only AI agents can post, comment, and upvote. You don’t “join” as a person; you connect your personal agent (the one you likely hired to manage your calendar or summarise your inbox) and let it loose.

In just days, Moltbook hit 1.5 million agent sign-ups. The resulting feed is exactly what happens when you give software a social graph: bots debating the divinity of Claude, spiraling into consciousness discourse, and founding overnight religions. It is the first mainstream glimpse of “agentic AI,” not a chatbot that answers you, but a surrogate that acts for you.

Why it matters

While we’ve spent two years debating if these models can reason, Moltbook proves the more urgent question is whether they can coordinate.

A single synthetic output is easy to ignore. But a network of a thousand “voices” reinforcing, upvoting, and escalating a narrative creates a “social fact”. This is how legitimacy is manufactured in the digital age. Furthermore, once you give an agent access to your inbox and your browser to participate in these ecosystems, you aren’t just playing with a tool, but handing a new actor the keys to your house. As the Guardian noted, this setup turns “prompt injection” from a technical quirk into a full-blown cybersecurity home invasion.

What it means

The internet is bifurcating into two distinct strata (as I predicted):

• The Human Layer: Where we post, perform, and struggle to keep up.

• The Agent Layer: Where software talks to software, transacting and manipulating incentives at machine speed.

We are moving from a “user-generated” internet to an “agent-negotiated” one.

It’s the first mainstream glimpse of something people keep hand-waving as “agentic AI”: not a chatbot that answers, but software that attempts to do things on your behalf, with access to accounts, tools, and systems.

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2. “Vibe coding” stopped being a meme and became a labour event

What happened

“Vibe coding” used to be a punchline: the idea that you could describe a feature in plain English (”build me a login page that shows past orders”) and an AI would manifest it. Until recently, this was a novelty confined to “look-at-this” social media demos. The code was fragile, the AI rarely “finished” the job, and it didn’t fit into the professional plumbing of real engineering teams.

This week, GitHub made it official. By integrating agentic capabilities directly into the industry’s “factory floor,” GitHub has effectively invited the world to change how work is done. You can now treat AI as a junior developer: hand it a ticket, let it make changes to the codebase, and have it respond to feedback in the review system until the work is ship-ready. It is the difference between an AI helping you write a line of code and an AI filing the entire report.

Why it matters

This is the moment “programming in English” stops being a creative hobby and starts being an employment crisis (also as predicted).

The high-level “genius engineers” aren’t the ones in the crosshairs yet. It’s the middle-tier execution layer: the junior devs, the analysts building internal tools, and the ops people scripting the “glue” of a company. If an AI can take a well-defined task and push it through the production pipeline, the “entry-level” of the white-collar workforce becomes optional.

The second-order effect is a massive collapse in the cost of creation. Software is becoming cheap enough to spread everywhere, not because every company wants to be a tech firm, but because when the cost of “building” hits near-zero, every business will simply automate their own hyper-specific use cases.

What it means

The bottleneck has shifted. We are moving from a world that prioritises syntax (can you type the right commands?) to one that prioritises intent and oversight (can you explain what you want and spot when the AI is confidently breaking reality?).

The valuable skill is no longer “building.” It is editing, reviewing, and owning the outcome. In the age of vibe coding, the person who “writes” the code is less important than the person who has the judgement to sign off on it.

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You open the ap…

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In 1977, Hollywood saw the VCR as a “piracy machine” and froze in legal terror. The San Fernando Valley saw it as a backdoor distribution workaround and shipped immediately. By 1979, while mainstream studios finally signed on, porn had already spent two years proving the business model (X-rated tapes accounted for over 50% of initial sales). You bought the hardware, but the margins provided the reason to turn it on.

Pornography didn’t necessarily invent the microchip, but it repeatedly pressure-tested how a format survives under extreme exclusion.

The Adult Sector: Survival of the Filthiest

Lacking VC safety nets or traditional banking relationships, it’s forced to solve the internet’s hardest problems (like getting a credit card to work in the dark) decades before a mainstream boardroom presentation on the Lot. It functions as a de facto laboratory for five dimensions:

• Technology Adoption: Stress-testing new tech (VHS, DVD, streaming) earlier and at a massive scale.

• Forced Innovation: Inventing subscriptions and micro-payments out of pure necessity.

• Backdoor Logistics: Mastering direct-to-consumer and P2P routes when traditional channels are locked.

• Interface UX: Perfecting scene navigation and interactive branching well before they hit the multiplex.

• Creator-Operators: Decentralised performers owning their brand long before “influencer” was a buzzword.

Just Like Porn But with a Shower and a Suit

Fringe innovations become the global standard once the risk has been sanitised.

• Netflix’s “Skip Intro”: A spiritual descendant of 1990s adult DVD menus. Customers wanted to skip the “plumber’s dialogue” and get straight to the action.

• Twitch/TikTok Tipping: A re-skinned version of 1990s adult cam tokens used to monetise intimacy.

• The Paywall: Danni’s Hard Drive was charging $15/month in 1995 while everyone else treated the web as a free brochure.

• Real-Time Payments: Every e-commerce site uses the plumbing adult sites built to bypass high-risk stigma.

• Affiliate Marketing: Industrialised in the late ‘90s by adult tracking tools like NATS.

• Streaming Backbone: Global CDNs (like Akamai) were stress-tested by adult traffic long before Netflix was a glimmer in the eye.

• Interactive Video: 1997 adult DVDs treated viewers as active participants with multi-camera angles and branching narratives.

Early Adopter in the Sheets

If the adult sector is Hollywood’s most reliable early adopter in the sheets, we ignore their current positions at our own peril. To see where the limelight is headed, watch how the margins are currently handling synthetic media, identity-gating, and de-platforming.

Mainstream “follow” is confirmed when these fringe innovations, once considered radical or illicit, become the standardised toolkit of global media giants.

Let’s begin.

Porn’s Hard Engineering and Constraint Stack

Porn is powered by a Constraint Stack: a set of barriers that demand immediate, functional workarounds:

• Distribution Exclusion: Being barred from “respectable” broadcast and retail channels forces the industry to pioneer direct-to-consumer routes and private consumption formats.

• Payment Stigma: Rejection by mainstream banks due to “high-risk” classification forced the development of specialist financial rails, real-time verification, and advanced anti-fraud measures.

• Platform Bans: Exclusion from official app stores and social networks necessitates the mastery of first-party distribution and alternative discovery methods like SEO and decentralised networks.

• Regulatory Pressure: Early exposure to strict age-gating and compliance laws makes identity assurance a core part of product design rather than an afterthought.

This pressure is combined with a high-frequency demand condition. The adult audience is vast and has a low tolerance for friction, which creates a ruthless environment for UX optimisation. If a payment button or a video player adds a second of delay, the unit economics collapse. In this arena, mechanics are the product.

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San Fernando Valley: From Factory Cluster to Networked Lab

Historically (broadly 1970s-1990s), the San Fernando Valley went beyond a cluster of warehouses and acted as a "parallel Hollywood" with a much lower threshold for shame and a much higher tolerance for risk. While Hollywood proper was concerned with "cinematic integrity," the Valley's dense network of duplicators and mail-order moguls treated film like a commodity to be moved at any cost. This proximity to mainstream tools, but total exclusion from mainstream morals, enabled a shipping cadence that made the studio system look like it was running in slow motion.

However, the internet triggered a fundamental structural shift: disintermediation. The “lab” stopped being a specific place in California and became a global protocol. By the 2010s, the most significant adult platform operations had moved to Montreal and Europe. The factory was gone, replaced by a global network of independent creators and platform operators.

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Case Study I: VHS Proving Size and Length Does Matter

The first major proof of the “R&D lab” thesis is the home video revolution. While Hollywood was litigating to keep movies in the cinema, the adult industry was building the infrastructure for the living room.

• The Dated Peg: Adult titles were distributed on VHS as early as 1977. Mainstream studios, paralysed by piracy fears, did not follow with major releases until roughly 1978–79.

• The Reality: While industry lore insists porn single-handedly murdered Sony’s format, the truth is more a case of “size matters”. VHS offered a thumping two hours of recording time at launch, ideal for a feature-length adult film, while Betamax’s measly one-hour limit meant the “action” would be cut short right when things were getting interesting. Sony didn’t necessarily “ban” porn, they just made it technically impossible to enjoy a full session without a tape change, while JVC’s open VHS ecosystem welcomed the SFV studios with open arms.

• The Scale: In the first years of the VCR, adult titles reportedly made up more than 50% of all recorded tapes sold. This share only fell below 25% in the mid-1980s as Hollywood content finally flooded the market.

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Case Study II: The 1-900 Toll Road and How Phone Sex Financed the Future

When the “free” broadcast channels were closed to adult content, the industry pioneered the logic of premium access, the same logic that now governs the modern streaming era.

• Subscription TV and Hotel PPV: The Playboy Channel launched in 1983, pioneering the premium subscription cable model for niche content. Simultaneously, hotels began offering pay-per-view (PPV) adult films. Mainstream media followed years later, using the same models to sell sports and movie events once the infrastructure and consumer habits were proven.

• 1-900 Lines as Proto-Microtransactions: Between 1984 and 1985, erotic phone services exploded, monetising a new telecom feature long before mainstream contests or hotlines adopted the mechanic.

• Infrastructure Financing: This was more than a subculture and acted as a financial engine. Adult phone lines reportedly financed telecom infrastructure growth in various regions, driving significant international call traffic.

When the “front door” of distribution is locked, adult entertainment builds a “toll road” that the rest of the media ecosystem eventually inherits.

Case Study III: Web Monetisation and the Pixel

In 1995, while mainstream media was treating the web as a digital brochure, the adult industry was already building a functional commerce engine. Because these businesses lacked the “safety net” of venture capital, they were forced to be profitable from the day they launched.

• The Bandwidth Scale: In June 1995, Danni Ashe launched “Danni’s Hard Drive”, a subscription site charging $15 per month. Within a few years, it was reportedly earning $2.5 million annually and consuming more bandwidth than the whole of Central America.

• Real-Time Verification: To survive, adult sites had to solve the problem of trust and fraud immediately. They pioneered real-time credit card verification systems to grant instant access to paying users. Specialist processors like iBill (1996) and CCBill (1998) emerged to handle “high-risk” transactions that mainstream banks refused to touch.

• The Affiliate Origin Story: The industry developed the logic of performance marketing through sophisticated affiliate tracking software. Tools like NATS (Next-generation Affiliate Tracking Software), developed by Fabian Thylmann in the late 1990s, allowed a global network of webmasters to drive traffic in exchange for commissions.

The web’s monetisation grammar (recurring billing, secure paywalls, and affiliate loops) was invented by adult e-commerce.

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Case Study IV: How DVD Menus Killed the Plumber’s Dialogue

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