The day after our resident street photographer landed in Portland, Oregon, the President of the United States declared it a "war zone," intending to send in troops following absurd occupations in D.C. and Chicago. But a long walk in Northeast revealed the vibe on the street was, well, not that.

This London Fashion Week has been a dazzling display of global design talent in the U.K. capital. Emerging designers turned heads. There was that upcycled parachute gown. And street style for days. But this recap is about an anxiety attack I had. Before the one show that, ultimately, gave me chills.

Between “The AI Con” book tour and marking three years of her “accidental” hit podcast, she still has time for Power Lunch. The director of research at DAIR — and ex-senior research scientist at Google — talks “AGI” silliness, the power of imagining possible futures and, of course, roller derby.

Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is the Back Indie Media Drive, Project C’s newsletter merger and the new new media ecosystem emerging beyond Substack’s walled garden.

My hand hurts. Ouch! I take a break to read research about handwriting’s much-publicized (alleged) death spiral. I then proceed to finish drafting the latest in the experimental BTS @ ESC series entirely with a pen — leaving you with something poetic to talk about at your next power lunch. *Wink*

She sold her first book on a lie. The lie? That she cared about tech burgers. Now, in the middle of a move back to New York City, a move off Substack, and her memoir, we set the table to discuss the mess of media work— covering everything from Carrie Bradshaw’s per word rates to martini tattoos.

Silicon Valley’s sharpest critic, Paris Marx marks 5 years of Tech Won’t Save Us, telling ESC KEY .CO how he pushed through early anxiety to make the essential podcast on the subject. We set the table to discuss exiting U.S. tech, the state of criticism and one guest who made him a little nervous.

Last week, I got a creepy notification nudging me to follow an ex — on Substack. Then I realized how comprehensively the app had scraped my phone's contacts, a la the dark patterns of the monopoly-chasing social platforms that came before. My first question was, when had I ever consented to this?!

For her second graphic novel, “Simplicity,” this acclaimed cartoonist and a former editor at The Nib tried a new approach: save any idea that intuitively seemed to “fit.” She did that for more than a year. We set the table to talk her process, a literal vision and making trans culture right now.

For the latest in the experimental BTS @ ESC series, we mark our six-month anniversary by rounding up six books that got you talking. But this wouldn't be ESC KEY .CO unless we turned a listicle into an exploration of why book lists have such cultural power — and why lists will outlive the internet.

Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is the way climate change is tanking the world’s productivity, but venture capitalists would rather you not talk about actual productivity solutions.

Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is vastly improved GIF archaeology via the new GifCities search engine plus a short history of GeoCities cyber neighborhoods and the case for reclaiming the “netizen” label. 

Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is post-rainbow capitalism and post-”sustainability,” and the big question we face: Where do we push it next?

On Thursday, ESC KEY .CO brought our Clean Creatives reporting to life with a soft-launch event at Somerset House. We called out bullshit, mapped greenwashing tactics and took instant photos. Most importantly, we found our people. Turns out, community can be more than a buzzword.

****Vroom vroom! Welcome to Power Tools**** , a series of guides that give you frameworks and toolkits for navigating our very online era. Bookmark each guide so you can come back to it for analysis from some of the smartest minds on the subject and deep analysis to help you snap out of the doomscrolling. Behind every bit of climate misinformation is a creative strategy, an agency, and a media outlet or social platform taking the fossil fuel industry’s oily money. Ending the creative pipeline can be a climate solution, say the thousands of workers who have taken the _Clean Creatives pledge_. I’ve spent the past few weeks chatting with the movement’s organizers, volunteers, agency leaders and comedic climate campaigners to map how we can call out the bullshit, find community and put our creativity to better use. ## Get the weekly briefing JD Shadel's ESC KEY .CO is read by terminally online pros like you who, like, totally need to log off more. Join us! Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. No crypto. Unsubscribe if you hate it. I also attempted to fall asleep using a new wellness app that resulted in me feeling very tired the next day. Put on a pot of coffee. Let’s begin with me sleepless in my grungy flat at approximately 3 a.m. ## How does Richard Edelman sleep? I tried to find out but have no answers I could not sleep. I opened my eyes again and my bedroom ceiling had turned a paler shade of gray, the cloudy London sky out my window tinged with the early morning moon. I didn’t want to know how many hours I’d observed the slight tonal shifts in the lighting while rotating to back sleeping, right side, left side, back to back. It’s relevant to know that I’ve always struggled with “sleep hygiene,” what my fittest friends say when they mean “sleeping well.” I’ve got bedtime reminders that ding on my devices at 12:30 a.m., which I, um, _sometimes_ ignore. I gave up long ago on surveilling my own body by tracking my sleep with a smartwatch — its significant amounts of sleep-stage data I also ignored. During lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, when alarming headlines raced through my anxious brain in the middle of the night, I’d tried the Calm app’s sleep stories to quiet the noise. But I’d instead hyperfixate on the plotlines and the exaggeratedly chill ASMR accents (to this day, I hear the French Whisperer haunt my ears whenever I toss and turn). Most nights, I typically put on a classical piano playlist. But tonight, my inability to snooze was different, almost sinister. All because I wanted to know how the boomer nepo baby of the PR industry could sleep — and ergo, no concerto. Rather, in the background, I heard the rustic and energetic thrum of a violent wildfire consuming a forest. And the siren-like whistle of a hurricane blended with the crackles of ancient old-growth woodlands burning, releasing their carbon into the atmosphere. I closed my eyes. Actual sirens looped. But it was the intermittent screams that were really getting to me. I opened this new wellness app I was using to simulate how the CEO of an agency making bank off of climate destruction might be sleeping. I tapped the sound mixer and slid down the volume on the enabled “ambiances” — the nasty cocktail of Wildfire, Hurricane, Sirens and Screams. Then I slid up another “ambiance” called Drilling to max. Could this one lull me into a relaxed state of climate denial? No, after a couple of seconds of that, I determined that there is no way I could sleep like Richard Edelman, CEO and son of the founder of Edelman. The Oilwell app's sleep sound mixer lets you blend the soothing sounds of climate catastrophe. Meanwhile, the Fire Tornado Lullaby preset promises the perfect good night, but fails to deliver. That’s the conceit of this newly released _spoof wellness app, Oilwell,_ which climate campaigners have given the apt taglines, “Relax … it’s only the climate crisis” and “Oilwell is a wellness app to help you embrace climate chaos, created by Edelman, Oil and Gas PR.” It’s a project by _Serious People_, a creative collective using satirical campaigns and subversive stunts to expose complicity and provoke action. “We’ve been obsessed for a while with the different ways in which all of us push the climate crisis out of our minds. Big oil PR firms like Edelman are extreme examples of this,” Jamie Inman, former brand strategist turned Serious People’s campaign director, tells ESC KEY .CO. ## “Oilwell is satire but ‘relax, it’s only the climate crisis’ is pretty much the playbook.” The “small but mighty” collective’s prior projects include _Ogilvyland_, a “fossil fuel funfair” which satirized the ad agency’s fossil fuel contracts, and the particularly elaborate _Asset Manager Quest_ campaign, which centered on a custom-made video game solely created to “ _annoy fossil fuel financiers_.” With Asset Manager Quest, Serious People went to Nathan Fielder-esque lengths to get as many as 600 employees at Abrdn, a Scottish firm, to play the game. Once Abrdn banned access to the web game, Oli Frost, Serious People’s creative lead, got a train north to Scotland. Frost strapped an arcade version of the game to his back and attempted to enter Abrdn’s offices, where security turned him away. “It might be quite funny if you wrestled me to the ground,” Frost told security, who declined on camera. “As a group, we started Serious People to demand greater urgency from all the ‘serious’ institutions that are letting us down,” says Inman. “Oli had been doing climate comedy with some big hits on social media. I was looking for something new after dropping out of advertising.” (Among his climate comedy songs, _Frost wrote one about Greta Thunberg_, to which _Thunberg even danced the Macarena_.) Launched earlier this month, Oilwell targets Edelman’s clients in the health and sustainability sectors, nudging them to drop Edelman. “They pretend to care about their employees’ wellbeing while they work with polluting clients that are setting our future on fire,” Inman says. “Oilwell is satire but ‘relax, it’s only the climate crisis’ is pretty much the playbook.” The Oilwell app's interface mimics popular wellness apps like Calm or Headspace, but with a dystopian twist. From guided meditations on 'breathing in sulphur dioxide' to mood trackers offering options like 'overwhelming dread' and 'nihilistic surrender,' the app's dark humor exposes how we're expected to stay calm while the planet burns. The fully functional app resembles the slick, minimal user experience interfaces of popular meditation and mental health apps such as Calm or Headspace, with many of the same features including a mood tracker and guided meditations. But these are not your typical moods or meditations. Midway through writing this paragraph, I was feeling a bit anxious about the deadline. So I put in my headphones, took a walk in a park and tried a few of the Oilwell meditations including “ _Endless Growth Affirmation: Breathe in profit, breathe out responsibility_;” “ _Smog Breathing Exercise: Let go of your attachment to breathable air_;” and “ _Carbon Capture Dreams: Imagine solutions we’ll never really implement_.” They didn’t calm me down. I wondered again about Edelman’s CEO, if he had access to some effective lobotomy-like brain surgery that let him go about his day without even the slightest bit of regret that his company provided the spin doctors the fossil fuel industry relied upon to distort reality. Indeed, Edelman is “perhaps the most notorious PR agency for its fossil fuel interests,” according to Clean Creatives, a global initiative that aims to end the creative industry’s association with fossil fuel polluters. Each year it publishes its agency F-List, _highlighting Edelman as chief among “the mad men fueling the madness.”_ Ads like this are likely to inspire a lot of people to try the meditations. Edelman, the planet’s largest public relations agency, has previously made sensible-seeming doublespeak claims about environmental sustainability a la classics like, “The realities of climate change are evident with more frequent and devastating weather events impacting people all over the world, but institutions lack the trust to do what is right and necessary to slow the crisis.” (_This is _not_ fine_.) The rallying cry for a special climate-themed edition of its signature report, the Edelman Trust Barometer, read, “ _Optimism is the opportunity_,” which itself sounds like a parody of press release cliches. Further, Edelman himself wrote in a blog post about the 2023 report: “Our data tells us that if people distrust institutions, climate optimism is nearly impossible.” Nowhere did he mention that all the while, his company has raked in millions in cash from contracts with the fossil fuel industry, or that he’s been named among _“America’s top climate villains”_ by The Guardian. “We know that Edelman is going to try the classic PR trick of confusing the situation, so we want to make things really clear: if Edelman wants to be trusted on climate, they need to drop fossil fuels,” _said Duncan Meisel, Clean Creatives’ campaign director, around the time_ of the Trust Barometer report. _But like clockwork in 2024, Edelman renewed its PR contract with Shell_. Oli Frost, right, leads a live Oilwell meditation next to a participant wearing climate denial headgear. Photo courtesy of Serious People. In a press release announcing the app, Frost, creative director behind Oilwell, put it wryly: “Why change the world when you can change people’s perception of it? This isn’t just the philosophy of our app. It’s the reason fossil fuel and PR companies work together.” To promote the app, Serious People posed as Richard Edelman and sent invitations to employees and key clients. Next, they gathered on the stairs outside Francis House, home to Edelman’s London headquarters, for a live Oilwell meditation. One participant wore a glowing helmet, what the creators have dubbed “climate denial headgear.” ## How creative workers can call out the anti-science, anti-climate, anti-humanity bullshit “Big oil has big budgets and fewer morals. All we have is our creativity and some fighting spirit,” Inman tells me. And even when the odds seem stacked against creative workers, it’s worth remembering that creativity has inherent power — otherwise, those who want to spread misinformation wouldn’t invest so much money in it. Oilwell's promotional materials parody wellness app aesthetics with cheerful illustrations and toxic positivity messaging. The app's tagline, "Relax ... it's only the climate crisis," encapsulates how PR firms help the fossil fuel industry normalize planetary destruction through emotional manipulation. For decades, the creative industries and mass media have played a central role in greenwashing and public confusion about the climate emergency. Take BP's carbon footprint campaign from 2004, created by Ogilvy & Mather. It shifted blame from oil companies to individuals — quintessential greenwashing that’s still warping the discourse today. Two decades of carbon footprint calculators and the like have failed to meaningfully address the climate emergency, partly because of the confusion caused by this creative parlor trick. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and publicity work promoting a “transition” to green energy, the fossil fuel industry invests a minuscule amount of its massive revenues into renewables. The creative greenwashing has worked. By that logic, ending the greenwashing might help, too. Indeed, every misleading message about climate change starts with a fossil fuel company working with an agency — that’s the rallying cry of Clean Creatives, a movement which has in the last five years grown to more than 1,400 agencies and 2,500 individuals pledging not to work with fossil fuel clients. Co-founded by Meisel and supported by Fossil Free Media, Clean Creatives has one clear guiding principle: Stopping fossil fuel PR and advertising is itself part of the climate solution. That line of thinking has inspired actions such as the annual agency F-List and a campaign _urging B Lab to revoke B Corp certification from agencies that work with fossil fuel clients_ — which resulted in _Havas London losing its B Corp status_ in 2024 due to its work for Shell. Working for the fossil fuel industry is the new smoking. Clean Creatives has grown to more than 1,400 agencies pledging not to work with fossil fuel clients. Many creative workers may never have to make an ethical choice about a fossil fuel project, but they still may find themselves working for an organization or industry that profits off of the climate emergency. And that can be an unsettling thing to grapple with, explains Ellana Sloan, a former strategist at Edelman. “When I joined Edelman, I was really excited. I felt as though brands really had that opportunity to move the needle,” she tells me. But then a senior leader in the company flagged her work on a company newsletter, suggesting that using terms like “intersectional environmentalism” could put client relationships in jeopardy. In 2020, she took the Clean Creatives pledge, found allies within the company and started to speak up. It was this experience in F-List agency life that inspired Sloan, now associate strategy director at _the community_, to team up with Drew Solomon, another ex-Edelman colleague, to create a workshop, “Call Out the BS: How to Speak Up & Push Back in Advertising and PR,” which they presented last year at New York City Climate Week. It was so popular that they’ve since turned the workshop into a resource others can present in their own communities. Last month, more than a hundred creatives attended the _first online version of the event_, which walked creatives through the skills they need to challenge industry complicity. Over the last several weeks, I’ve been speaking with pledgers in the Clean Creatives network, on and off the record, about navigating the many sleepless nights that come with aligning your values with your work. In a time where fascism is on the rise, public leaders spread disinformation. and brands with no spines are quietly deleting their performative climate and human rights commitments, everyone agrees there’s never been a more crucial time to call out the bullshit. But where do you start? Why not level one! ## Level 1: The green-colored glasses come off Laura Ranzato learned about the power of creative messaging in service of bullshit while fighting coal mines on Indigenous lands in Alaska. There was one company — Usibelli Coal — that had perfected a particularly insidious pitch, she recalls. They marketed Alaska coal as cleaner and better for the environment because it was “locally made,” as if they were neighbors selling eggs at a farmers market. “And that message? It worked,” Ranzato tells me. “People repeated that BS back to me — not because it was true, but because it sounded like it might be.” The experience crystallized something essential about how fossil fuel companies operate: “When fossil fuel companies want something — land, water or public trust — they don’t show up with facts. They show up with strategy. With creatives who know how to make an idea land.” That insight is what fuels Clean Creatives, where Ranzato is organizing director and a consultant. The Clean Creatives campaign has drawn widespread media attention, with coverage spanning trade publications and mainstream outlets. But first, the movement had to watch those same companies abandon even the pretense of caring about the climate transition. Throughout the last few years, but especially in early 2025, amid the regime change in the United States, evidence mounted that major oil companies were retreating from their earlier climate commitments. BP, which had once set an ambitious goal among oil majors to reduce oil production by 40% by 2030, quietly lowered that target to 25% before signaling an even sharper pullback from renewable energy investments. Shell followed a similar path, scaling back its green initiatives while increasing oil and gas production. More than two decades after BP became the first major oil company to publicly acknowledge climate change, the industry appeared to be signaling a clear shift away from its previous climate ambitions. In other words, now they’re hardly pretending to care about science. “The green-colored glasses are off,” as the“Call Out the BS” workshop framed it at NYC Climate Week. Fossil fuel companies are openly working against the transition, not facilitating it. The anti-science bullshit has also coincided with a broader retreat from human rights and diversity across corporate America, which, yet again, was brands simply showing their true colors. In January, for instance, Amazon quietly removed sections such as “equity for Black people” and “LGBTQ+ rights” from its website and scrubbed mentions of marginalized folks from its public policies. Google, too, removed references to diversity and inclusion from investor reports. Meta disbanded its entire DEI team and ended its affiliated programs. McDonald’s, Target, Walmart, Disney — the list kept growing. “It feels like brands are really showing their cards,” says Sloan, who left her strategy role at Edelman in 2021 after watching the world’s largest PR firm navigate similar contradictions. The rollbacks weren’t separate phenomena but part of the same calculus: As political winds shifted, companies that once competed to showcase values began treating them as liabilities. It may not be that surprising to find out that many in positions of power never really cared. Clearly, centering corporate actors in movements has amounted to things like, say, pinkwashed fast fashion produced by workers who weren’t paid living wages, to name only one example of rainbow capitalism’s absurdities. The point is not a return to Pepsi ads with Kendall Jenner or empty “sustainability” speak that’s ultimately greenwashing. That was never the point. The point, all along, has been to hold people in power accountable. And the first step toward calling out such bullshit, it turns out, is being clear eyed about just how much of it there is. ## Level 2: Build your bullshit radar — and see bullshit everywhere The realization that your industry is complicit in planetary destruction can, at first, let the wind out of your sails a little. But Clean Creatives pledgers tell me that the sense of overwhelm serves nobody but the powerful. The antidote requires we recognize their manipulative patterns and mind tricks. When Sloan joined Edelman’s sustainability efforts, the focus was almost laughably narrow, she recalls. “We had started the green team and we'd been kind of improving our report card, but it was very much through the lens of like, ‘Are we printing on both sides?’” It did not ever extend to client vetting. The gap between office recycling and client strategy was largely intentional. Corporate sustainability has become an elaborate shell game, where companies spotlight incremental improvements while ignoring their most destructive work. Activists have developed a taxonomy for these tactics. Greenlighting means spotlighting minor green initiatives to distract from major harms — like that car commercial emphasizing fuel efficiency while the company lobbies against emissions standards. Greenshifting blames consumers for corporate choices — think oil companies’ campaigns about individual carbon footprints while they expand drilling operations. Greencrowding hides behind industry-wide mediocrity (“everyone else does it too”). The playbook gets more sophisticated: greenlabeling calls something sustainable when it’s not, greenrinsing changes ESG targets before they’re achieved, and greenhushing under-reports sustainability credentials to evade scrutiny. This can help you know when a potentially greenwashed brief comes across your desk. For independent studios, it can even help you more effectively team up with the right kind of clients. That’s the case with _Wholegrain Digital_, a London-based web design firm founded by Tom and Vineeta Greenwood. It’s the shop behind the _Sustainable Web Manifesto_. ## “To stay true to those values, it really does matter who we work with.” They’ve built their entire business model around an _ethical screening criteria_. The process automatically disqualifies clients involved in fossil fuels, tobacco, arms or other prohibited industries. And it opens up generative conversations with clients in gray areas. “The values of our agency are rooted in doing good work that does not harm the planet or people, thus to stay true to those values, it really does matter who we work with,” says Bailey Bryan, the firm’s new business manager. The screening process isn’t ethical theater as much as a way to preserve the team’s energy for the work that drives their bottom line. “It means we have frank conversations early, and it establishes a partnership right away with companies that weave purpose into their business model,” Bryan notes. “For those we are not aligned with, it means we don’t spend resources on pitches or projects that were never going to be the right fit to begin with.” Once you know what to look for, the bullshit becomes impossible to ignore. That can, in turn, help you more quickly find your people. ## Level 3: Find allies and work together Drew Solomon knows what it is like to feel alone in a room where no one else wants to admit the emperor has no clothes. Early in his career, he recalls an agency event where leaders celebrated their client in the tobacco industry: “I remember people applauding and cheering and me feeling like, this is so so strange. Why are we applauding and cheering for building a cigarette brand into something huge? That was so viscerally odd.” Simply declining the client projects started to feel like it wasn’t enough. “I reached a point where I was like, I don’t think it’s enough that I just say I’m not going to work on tobacco and I’m not going to work on private prisons and I’m not going to work on fossil fuels,” he tells me. “What we need is for these behemoth agencies who control all of the world’s communication, all of the world’s marketing and all of the world’s advertising to stop doing these things. To stop entirely.” This is when you need to find your people. “Initially, there can be an incredible isolationism, which is so strange because, of course, I know I’m not the only one in my entire company who believes we have to save our habitable climate,” he says. “But it’s just not completely confirmed until you meet your people. It’s a very hard place to be in, at first.” Solomon learned what organizers teach: “You have to find someone else to do it with you and you have to find a group to do it with you,” he says. While working at Edelman, his breakthrough came when he connected with people like Sloan. Suddenly, he had company. Eventually, they both moved out of Edelman into other agencies — Solomon is now senior vice president of paid social at _Horizon Media_. But they have continued their vocal advocacy through Clean Creatives and other avenues, as well. Last year, when they presented the “Call Out the BS” training at NYC Climate Week, Sloan experienced what she calls a “heartening moment.” The abstract idea of community becomes a concrete reality when people show up. “We talk about the fact that we’re all trying to do something, but to physically see people show up — to see the manifestation of it in that room — was really encouraging. It was a good reminder that we have a voice.” The first move can be small: Start with one ally. Maybe that colleague who rolled their eyes during a greenwash-y presentation. The strategist who asked a sharp question in that client briefing. Or the designer who seems quietly frustrated with the problematic pitches. These conversations often begin tentatively. But once you find your people, Solomon and Sloan discovered, the work becomes not just possible but energizing. The movement grows one conversation at a time. ## Level 4: Practice the art of strategic questions The fossil fuel industry has spent decades convincing people that climate activism requires an advanced degree. It’s a convenient myth that keeps uncomfortable questions at bay, which means it’s time to raise them. “Fossil fuel companies and their facilitators love to suggest, if you're not a scientist and you don’t have a PhD, you don’t have a right to talk about climate change,” Solomon says. “That has trickled down into our colleagues and people at agencies.” But calling out corporate contradictions only requires skeptical curiosity. “You don’t have to have any expertise. All you need to know is that agencies say they’re working on facilitating a transition from fossil fuels. But oil companies have no planned transition. It’s that simple and it’s that clear.” Despite hundreds of millions spent on "transition" messaging, the fossil fuel industry invests just 1% of revenues in renewables. Sloan suggests you can start small by finding opportunities to ask questions. “How can the questions you’re asking in those rooms — client briefings, kickoffs — at least start to make bells go off in other people’s heads?” she asks. For instance, you might ask how a company’s climate commitments align with their actual investments. Question whether “transition” work actually involves any measurable shift away from fossil fuels. Challenge feel-good sustainability messaging by requesting concrete data on, say, scope three emissions — the indirect impacts that many companies prefer to ignore. The goal isn’t to become a climate scientist overnight. It’s to become comfortable asking the questions that everyone’s thinking but no one wants to voice. ## Level 5: Performance and courage The moment arrives faster than you might expect, and few people acknowledge the psychology of it. You’re in a company town hall, a client briefing or a strategy meeting, and suddenly the opportunity is there — a chance to ask the question that’s been gnawing at you for months. Solomon knows the feeling well. “We have to acknowledge that there is fear, how scary it is to speak up. I am scared, yes. I’ve had to go outside and catch my breath when I knew I was going to say something ‘controversial,’” he says. Yet something shifts once you actually do it. He and Sloan emphasized to me that calling out bullshit is as much about skills you learn as it is about having the right words. In person, it requires presence, projection, eye contact. They can be the difference between being heard and being dismissed. And they’re skills anyone can learn and feel better about practicing. Once you push through, it becomes easier. “What I wish people knew is how liberating it is to speak the truth alongside your community, how good that feels on the other side.” Solomon reflects. He and Sloan would ping each other after particularly tense meetings: “That felt so good.” The relief was palpable. Finally using your voice instead of swallowing your convictions. But Solomon is also clear-eyed about who gets to take these risks. “I acknowledge my privilege. I am employed. I have a salary, I have health insurance, I have benefits. And so it is my responsibility to speak up for others and speak up for those who don’t have those things.” This reality check matters. In this economy, several freelancers I spoke to while working on this piece expressed off the record that they would, of course, be open to signing a pledge to not work with fossil fuel clients. But they also worried that if they got too vocal with their activism, they might be dismissed from the work they need to pay this month’s rent. The candid conversations I’ve had underscore the power differential between the CEOs of the big agencies and the creatives, strategists, planners, researchers, account executives and all the other cogs it takes to make the industry’s machines run. Yet, as Clean Creatives shows, movements work when people contribute what they can — whether that's speaking up in meetings, taking the pledge, or simply refusing complicit work. ## “The climate experts are not always the most creative communicators. They need you! We need you!” Those with the most job security have the most obligation to use their voices. The alternative is complicity dressed up as pragmatism. “Our colleagues sometimes get stuck on that hard question, what can I do? There’s, of course, something you can do. You can speak up, find your people, create momentum and do something about it.” “All I have is my voice. And all you have is yours,” he concludes. “Whether you use it in your community or with your government or with your employer, being able to use your voice and speak your mind and speak the truth really overrides that fear in the end.” ## What if you _don’t_ want to create a spoof wellness app? I, for one, slept better when I stopped using the Oilwell app. One night of that misery was enough for the anecdotal introduction to this article. Serious People activists demonstrated the Oilwell app on London's Millennium Bridge, complete with "climate denial headgear" and satirical meditation sessions targeting Edelman's fossil fuel PR work. But throughout my reporting, I kept finding myself circling that question, how well does Richard Edelman sleep? But really? Therefore, I sent the following email to give Edelman an opportunity for him to weigh in, and I will update you with any response I get from him or his team. ## Get the weekly briefing JD Shadel's ESC KEY .CO is read by terminally online pros like you who, like, totally need to log off more. Join us! Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. No crypto. Unsubscribe if you hate it. > _Greetings! > > I am a journalist working on an article for ESC KEY .CO, the only lifestyle newsletter on the internet, and I mention Edelman’s work for the fossil fuel industry. > > I had a few super quick questions: > - Is CEO Richard Edelman aware of the Oilwell app? > - If yes, has Richard followed any of the guided meditations? > - I would also like to know if Richard has tried the sleep mixer? The reason is, in the article I’m writing, I mention how I tried to sleep with the sleep mixer turned on, and I found it very unpleasant, so I was wondering if Richard had a similar experience, or any thoughts on how well he sleeps, in general? > > I would be more than happy to invite Richard to do an interview with ESC KEY .CO, and if he would like to take this moment to announce Edelman canceling contracts with fossil fuel companies, I can add that into the article, no problem. (If he did announce that in an interview with me, it could also be a great boost to my traffic. And as a new publication, I would sincerely appreciate the boost!) So, do let me know! > > After all, there is no lifestyle on a burning planet. > > And, as Richard has written, no climate optimism without trust. > > Sincerely, > JD _ I'll admit. This kind of email is like maybe a level two activity. But no matter the level you engage at, it’s likely you’re also going to sleep better knowing that you’re doing _something_ in your control. “There’s power in laughter to reconnect us with uncomfortable truths, to bring us together, to rally our spirits in the face of a crisis that is quite overwhelming,” Inman of Serious People tells me. “The climate experts are not always the most creative communicators,” he adds. “They need you! We need you!”

## The thing is: “AI” is a sinister bubble pumped full of VC-grade helium. The business guys inhaling it — dizzy, cocksure — are pressuring creative workers to take a hit, too. The cartoonish repetition of ungrounded claims starts to resemble that old BuzzFeed video, “ _People Inhale Helium For The First Time_.” But unlike that bit of peak 2010s millennial-core fluff, this hype is no joke — it’s a distraction from real, current harms. Too much helium? You're bound to lose consciousness. **“The hype-mongers not only spin fantastical tales about what the tech can do, but they also work to convince you that if you don’t jump on the bandwagon, you’ll be left in the dust,”** write _Emily M. Bender_ and _Alex Hanna_ in their cathartic, crisply argued and irreverently comedic new book, “ _The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want_.” > “If they couldn’t be bothered to write this, why should we be bothered to read it?” I’ve breezed through an advance copy in the lead up to its U.K. release on May 22. It’s vintage Bender and Hanna lines like this that capture the painfully cringe experience of, say, logging onto LinkedIn in the year of our lord 2025: **“Everyone on the bandwagon has to sing the same droning chant of AI mantras (‘Feel the AGI!’, ‘Democratizing AI!’), getting louder and louder.”** And this one: **“We find ourselves asking: If they couldn’t be bothered to write this, why should we be bothered to read it?”** What if you don’t want to take in mouthfuls of their gas or sing along in their chorus? Well, with the scornful tone of a smart friend about to reveal the juiciest gossip you’ve been dying to hear, **“The AI Con” recounts some of the most popcorn-worthy reasons you might want to reject the hype.** ## Get the weekly briefing JD Shadel's ESC KEY .CO is read by terminally online pros like you who, like, totally need to log off more. Join us! Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. No crypto. Unsubscribe if you hate it. **Ergo, this is the kind of book that makes the broligarchs nervous, written by two of their most formidable critics.** Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, co-authored the widely cited 2021 paper, “ _On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜_” (Yes, the parrot emoji is included in the official title.) In 2023 she landed on the inaugural TIME100 AI list of most influential people. Hanna formerly worked as senior research scientist on Google’s Ethical AI team. Now, she is director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), the non-profit founded by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the Ethical AI Team. (Google ultimately fired Gebru due to the publication of the “Stochastic Parrots” paper, which she co-authored.) At DAIR, Hanna centers the communities most impacted by technology in her research. Together on their podcast, _Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000_, Bender and Hanna have earned an enthusiastic following for speaking some sense in the age of “AI” — surely, a marketing term neither would use without the obligatory __ scare quotes. > “Surprisingly many people, especially those in positions of power, seemingly want to be the naked emperors.” But their book is not merely a roast or a repeat of their greatest podcast hits, as delicious as those moments can be. **Bender and Hanna also acknowledge that in everyday life, resisting the intrusion of “AI” ultimately requires speaking truth to power — and that’s not always so easy.** “To speak up to say the emperor has no clothes is difficult,” Bender and Hanna write. “And it is doubly so when surprisingly many people, especially those in positions of power, seemingly want to be the naked emperors. That is, they want to believe the hype and convince everyone around to join them.” Thankfully, as they proclaim at the preface of “The AI Con” — and in the intro to their podcast — they’re here to pop the hype “with the sharpest needles we can find!” **And they’re handing out needles, too, by filling the book with strategies and examples of resistance from unionizing writers through to creatives “spoiling” the training data for diffusion models.** It’s as precise and detailed as it is witty and accessible. “The AI Con” is the field guide you’ve been waiting for to navigate this brave new world, with some hope for what might follow the bubble’s dramatic pop. ## The thing about that is: **The problem begins with thinking about “AI” as one super-powerful technology when it is, in fact, a marketing term that clusters together a lot of different technologies under one umbrella. Confusing, yes!** At present, when people say, “AI,” many are primarily referring to large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. But even an accurate understanding of LLMs requires thinking beyond the PR messaging that suggests it’s a digital product somewhere in the ether. “This term AI is not a singular thing,” _Hanna told Business Insider last week_ in an interview alongside her co-author. “Just like fast fashion or chocolate production, a whole host of people are involved in maintaining this supply chain,” she said. > “We were not previously aware that management was monitoring our members’ ChatGPT usage. We are concerned about this data collection.” And yet, another part of the problem is the media repeating the “AI” boosters’ claims in their reporting — or being compelled to use it behind the scenes by bosses. At least one leading online business publisher is even ranking its employees based on their time using chatbots. **Three days after Business Insider published its interview with Hanna and Bender, Nieman Lab reported that Insider’s management was pushing its staff to use Enterprise ChatGPT.** The report revealed that an all-hands meeting in late April had included the presentation of a leaderboard of employees, naming the top 10 based on their chatbot use. “We were not previously aware that management was monitoring our members’ ChatGPT usage. We are concerned about this data collection and will be requesting further information,” Morgan McFall-Johnsen, vice chair of the Insider Union, told Nieman Lab. **So pernicious is the hype that otherwise scrupulous media outlets have, at times, joined the chorus — often without much critical reporting on who really benefits from the Big Tech messaging and, crucially, who pays the considerable costs for the semblance of “automation” they sell.** “Journalists have not yet penetrated the public consciousness with the idea that, actually, AI is a very physical technology,” investigative journalist _Karen Hao told ESC KEY .CO_ in March, when she was gearing up for the release of another hotly anticipated book, “ _Empire of AI_,” which is also out this week, on May 20. (The tech world has been “nervously waiting for it,” host Kevin Roose admitted in the introduction to, let’s say, an __entertaining_ interview with The New York Times’ Hard Fork Podcast_.) “Silicon Valley really perpetuates the idea that AI exists in the cloud, that it exists in other worlds where it doesn't require our labor on Earth,” Hao told me when we spoke. But the opposite is true. The supply chain for inherently bullshitting LLMs relies on the theft of virtually all intellectual property on the internet, the exploitation of workers around the world and staggering environmental consequences. But thankfully, the facade begins to collapse when you inspect it closely. And collective efforts to educate and resist can cut through the spin. Earlier this year, I logged on Zoom for a workshop with Hao through the _Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series_, which she co-leads. “Any journalist in any context, whether they are from a country developing it or having AI exported to them, should feel ownership of covering the way that AI is impacting their communities,” she told me, noting that the series has experienced demand that quickly outpaced the Pulitzer Center’s initial goals. It is an encouraging signal to see thousands of individual journalists so engaged. “I mean, literally, it’s affecting every possible beat in the world.” > “The main story about AI is the human one, not the technical one.” **Hanna and Bender cite Hao’s reporting and work with the Pulitzer Center as one example of how creative workers can resist the Big Tech media machine:** “[Hao’s work training journalists] is critical, as it plans to unsettle the centrality of the tech narrative around the Global North and back to the Majority World, where much of the labor occurs,” they write in “The AI Con.” > It also aims to dispel the (intentional) obfuscation achieved by lumping all these technologies under ‘AI.’ And it ensures that the main story about AI is the human one, not the technical one. Even when the media hops on the bandwagon, the tires sometimes roll off with great embarrassment to the journalists onboard. Last February, for instance, Bender was surprised to read a quote attributed to her about Blender Bot 3, a Meta chatbot. The only problem, she hadn’t said anything of the sort. In the fake synthetic quote, a “synthetic Bender” observed the tech company’s struggles to address misinformation. After emailing the publication requesting a retraction, the editor admitted: “Actually, we had prompted Gemini AI to create a story about Blenderbot 3’s latest blunder and it created this article misquoting you. Maybe Blenderbot and Gemini are not so different :)” — and, I mean, what an ironic moment to drop a smiley emoticon. ## Where things get interesting: **“**** _Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place_****,”** **said Mira Murati, then OpenAI’s chief technology officer, last June while speaking at Dartmouth College’s school of engineering.** It was billed as a conversation about how the tools her company sold could negatively affect people’s jobs. Certainly, many in the creative industries have taken note of our Big Tech overlord’s apparent disdain, contempt and complete lack of understanding about what it means to be “creative.” Their “democratizing” doublespeak rings hallow when you see it for what it is: a claim that sounds nice but ultimately enriches the wealthiest people in the world. **(Murati’s net worth is an**** _estimated $1.4 billion_****.)** It’s clear what they really mean by “democratizing creativity” is more something along the lines of “we want to steal your art, your prose, your poetry; we want to sell your bosses and clients tools that they’ll use to replace you; and even where you’re not outright replaced, the market for your work may tank as a result. And it is all done to line our pockets.” **At Dartmouth, Murati simply said the quiet part out loud.** Consequently, what we might term creative industry _n-AI-hilism_ is everywhere you look — the bitter cocktail of cynicism, pessimism and apathy that the tech is here and our careers are on the line due to a bunch of “freemium,” labor-breaking tools. Among creative workers, this n-AI-hilism seems to follow several stages, akin to grief. It typically starts with disbelief (a la “that can’t possibly affect me! I’m a travel blogger and chatbots can’t travel!”). Then comes the justified defense (the blogger friend who said that later told me something to the effect of, “how dare my client, a travel agency, replace me with a chatbot!”). Next, it might look like posting “golden age of my industry” porn to LinkedIn. Or, for some tired creatives, it mean throwing your hands up in the air (how many times have you read a LinkedIn post where somebody wrote, “AI is here, like it or not”). From there, the nihilistic tendencies seem to fork in two directions — either embrace the hype (“I’m launching a Substack about how to 10x your productivity with AI!”) or __ retire (“ _I will buy a house in an abandoned Italian village for one Euro!_”). It’s understandable that workers feel under siege. Tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of the Blood in the Machine newsletter, declared earlier this month that “the AI jobs crisis is here.” He was responding to news that Duolingo’s CEO recently said “being an “AI-first” company] isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” But a laid-off Duo admitted to Merchant that this was all spin. [_Job cuts had already been taking place_. The translators were laid off in 2023, followed by the writers in October 2024. **“If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you that my job would become more and more editing AI content,” the fired Duolingo writer told Merchant. “I did not expect to be replaced so soon.”** All that is undeniable. But Bender and Hanna also aim to nudge you away from feeling total despair and defeat. Rather, “The AI Con” makes a more hopeful case for what workers and communities can achieve through individual and collective action. **Yet given the nihilistic tone in many creative fields at the moment, I wanted to hear directly from Bender and Hanna what they’d say to creative workers who increasingly feel like their jobs are on the frontline for cuts.** What’s the point of unpacking the hype if it’s costing us work in real time, a few impatient readers might wonder? > “I would hope that our book brings a sense of renewed possibility: both in terms of what can be achieved through solidarity and in terms of arguments that can be presented to those who buy synthetic media.” “For the artists and other creative workers who are seeing their ability to cobble together workable careers severely disrupted by the people peddling ‘AI’ and those buying it, I would hope that our book brings a sense of renewed possibility: both in terms of what can be achieved through solidarity and in terms of arguments that can be presented to those who buy synthetic media,” Bender tells ESC KEY .CO. In fact, this was one key audience they specifically wanted to reach, which is why the book weaves in a retelling of the Luddites, the 19th century textile workers who are widely misunderstood. They were not generally anti-technology. They were instead only against the technologies that worsened their craft and threatened their livelihoods. Luddites destroyed some machines with sledgehammers, the book recounts. But they left other machines untouched, ready to be used by human workers who genuinely benefited from them. Bender and Hanna draw a direct line from the Luddite’s protests to what the Hollywood writer’s strikes achieved in 2023. (Both of these examples, Luddites and Hollywood writer strikes, show that the strategy is targeted. It’s not that all tech is bad. For instance, this mildly dyslexic writer greatly benefits from old-school spellcheck. But spellcheck isn’t sold as a replacement for copyeditors.) Unionized action is one example, but in this economy, you’re lucky to be in a creative union job. **“We wrote this book with a lot of creative folks in mind. Many of them are not unionized and support themselves doing freelancing, which makes them particularly precarious,** ” Hanna tells me. “One of the things which we find really heartening [...] is how people lean into their expertise and focus on their craft in the face of so much AI slop and job displacement.” And, indeed, practicing creativity can be a part of the solution. **“People are coming up with creative ways to resist AI** , including tools like _Glaze and Nightshade_, which can ‘spoil’ training for diffusion models.There have also been strategies across industries for resisting AI, like the newly energized _Federal Unionists Network_ which gained thousands of members after DOGE infected different parts of the U.S. government.” ## The thing to talk about at your next power lunch: Whether you’ve got one boss or a bunch of bosses (i.e., clients), this book gives you a framework to discuss “AI” in settings where it has the potential to make your job shittier, even if outright replacement isn’t yet in the cards.**If you ask me, this book should count as a tax deduction. It’s that useful for anyone navigating creative careers under techno-feudalism.** **“Workers are banding together, and it's especially important right now,” Hanna tells ESC KEY .CO. “We hope that creatives can take hope in this, and that the book can help foment new avenues of collective action.”** The book’s single greatest contribution to our current hype-distorted discourse might, in fact, be the simplest to put into action: **“ask questions about the brass tacks of the system being promoted.”** > “We can burst the bubble, through pointed questions and pointier ridicule.” In addition to a _Cher-referencing title_ — “Do you believe in hope after hype?” — the final chapter includes a list of questions it’s wise for us to ask to cut through the promospeak. Questions including: What is being automated? Who benefits from this technology, who is harmed and what recourse do they have? How was the system developed? What are their labor and data practices? **“We can burst the bubble, through pointed questions and pointier ridicule,” they argue at the end of the book.** > We can build up information literacy, both through our individual practices, and through supporting and learning from other informational institutions — namely libraries. We can collectively shape innovation towards benefiting people at large rather than enriching the few, through enforcing existing regulation and crafting new. And we can and must resist narratives of inevitability through collective labor action and strategic refusal. And, at least, we can have a ball along the way. “It can be flat-out fun to find the silliest excesses of the hype machine and deflate it, with ridicule as praxis,” they conclude. **And let’s be honest, whose party would you rather be at — the broligarch’s? Or popping the bro’s balloons with Bender and Hanna?** ## And one long thing to read: “The AI Con” is available now in the United States and affiliated markets and comes out May 22 in the United Kingdom from Penguin Books: THE AI CONHow to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We WantTHE AI CON

****Nom nom nom! Welcome to Power Lunch**** , a series of speculative lunches with creative minds navigating achievement and reinvention in our very weird era. Is a Power Lunch a case study? Knowledge exchange? Restaurant rec?! Nothing’s off the table. Like you, **ESC KEY .CO’s second Power Lunchee** **Celeste Noche** sits on the edge of the internet and peers into the void, where it seems the whole of visual culture sprawls before her in an infinite scroll. But unlike you, she must help decide which images win this year’s prizes. It’s honestly a little overwhelming. A few weeks ago, she gazed discerningly at yet another striking image on her screen. She zoomed in. She studied its composition. She flicked back and forth between a few other pictures. She momentarily stared into the distance, pondering the weight and consequences of her decisions. She took a break outside to tend to her budding mid-spring garden in Portland, Oregon’s eastside, as the City of Roses wheezed with hay fever and an incessant stream of allergic tears. But she must return to her screen. She must look closer still at the countless images awaiting her generous, judicial eyes. She must. To be fair, she didn’t ask to be _the Law Roach of lifestyle photography_, but _this is her sworn duty_. But seriously, Noche is in the midst of that rare kind of visual overload that also happens to be a career honor. Lucky for the entrants of the 13th annual _National Geographic Traveller_ (UK) Photography Competition, she is one of six judges on the 2025 panel. Together, judges trawl through an overwhelming number of entries in six categories from food and city scenes to people and wildlife. And who is more qualified to be a judge than Noche? _Across her prolific editorial career_, she has gazed into the viewfinder for most every major American newspaper (The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, you get _the_ picture) and lifestyle glossy (Bon Appétit, Conde Nast Traveler, AFAR, Travel + Leisure, yeah, I said prolific already). I texted Celeste Noche, pictured here, asking if she had any behind-the-scenes photos of herself. She replied: "surprise I have very few photos of myself despite a 200k+ camera roll." She sent these screenshots, which I have arranged according to the battery levels on her phone at the time of screenshot. Photos courtesy of the people she screenshotted. Even so, in the midst of this accomplishment, the reality of being a working photographer in this economy stings. Yes, she’s chasing invoices for work completed six months prior. Yes, she’s following up with editors who’ve apparently forgotten how email works. And despite it all, she’s still vocally advocating for the industry to change. “There is this perceived idea of prestige and recognition,” Noche tells me. “And yet a lot of the same barriers still exist. It’s like ‘Congratulations! You’re a judge!’ But I have to remind myself that it’s not all of a sudden you’re respected within your industry. The industry still isn’t treating me differently.” Indeed, working for collective justice in this industry is a central theme in her career. As the founder of non-profit _Portland In Color_, she’s made her mission “disrupting homogeneity” in the arts and media landscape by “highlighting the voices and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color.” Portland In Color has changed the narrative in Oregon through its _free directory of Portland-based creatives_, as well as community-building and knowledge-sharing events focused on everything from financial literacy to “creative refresh” retreats. ## Get the weekly briefing JD Shadel's ESC KEY .CO is read by terminally online pros like you who, like, totally need to log off more. Join us! Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. No crypto. Unsubscribe if you hate it. It’s her concern with these indisputable but often ignored facts of creative work — facts of power, privilege and access — that makes her refreshingly candid about the whole undertaking. “We all have our own eyes where we see things differently, but it’s a weighty feeling to me,” she admits. “It makes me wonder if people who are more often in these positions take it seriously enough.” It is her skills in shade, snark and side-eye that equally make her an ideal lunch companion, which we have lunched together many times before. (For instance, at our last IRL lunch, an interview for a Washington Post travel feature last year, she had an apt word for the trend of hospitality companies coopting local creative culture: “ _vibewashing_.”) When we lunch this time, Noche has reviewed about half of the entries for the competition. “I’m a little behind,” she subtly laughs like the _Grinning Face with Sweat Emoji_. We grapple with what it means to be a visual artist in the age of infinitely “meh” synthetic slop; what clients destroy when they offload work to algorithms instead of humans; and the small joys of gardening with your kid. But, ultimately, the overwhelming theme in our luncheon is the art of judging people. **There’s only one rule to Power Lunch:** we are granted the power to lunch anywhere in the world, but the Power Lunchee must pick only one place where we will virtually gather. This rule is now in effect. 🍴🍴🍴 **You made it! So, where in the world are you right now?** I’m at home in Portland, Oregon right now. I say “right now” because as a traveling photographer, I’m often not in Portland. I just got back from a trip to the Philippines where I was working on a personal project and traveling with my mom for a few weeks. I’m happy to be back home. I’m about to leave again soon for New York and LA. But it’s nice I’m here in Portland. Celeste Noche is Power Lunching with her kiddo, who is Power Napping, in Lisbon. **I have to say, I have been really looking forward to Power Lunching with you because we do, indeed, have gossipy IRL lunches whenever we are in the same city together: London, Portland … where next? Thankfully, by the power vested in us by Power Lunch, we can figuratively “go” anywhere! And you have exceptional taste. So I’m on the edge of my seat. Where do you want us to go?** OK, I admit I felt a lot of pressure to answer this question. Partially because I work a lot in food. I have many friends who are food editors or work in restaurants. And so, I felt like I had to pick the perfect place! **No pressure. But I mean,_yes, pressure!_** At first, I considered taking us somewhere really fancy? Or maybe somewhere new that nobody’s covered before? But then, I had to follow my heart. And my heart wants us to go to Jollibee in Milan, Italy. This Google Maps screenshot shows the exact location of where we did (not) go for Power Lunch. I also screenshotted some menu items from the Jollibee website. Read to the end for more on the pies. **That is an elite choice.** Yeah, when I discovered there was a Jollibee in Milan, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, Filipino spaghetti is a thing. So Jollibee in Italy creates a really interesting contrast. Filipino food for lunch, while being in Italy at the same time — seems like a nice fantasy. **It sounds like we’ve got to order the Jolly spaghetti.** Yes! We’re at Jollibee in Italy! We _have_ _to_ get the Jolly spaghetti! I also think their names are so cute — like Chickenjoy fried chicken with Jolly spaghetti. Fact: Anthony Bourdain loved their fried chicken and Jolly spaghetti. That’s such a source of Filipino pride. Because the fried chicken _is_ nice. I mainly eat pescatarian and don’t opt for a lot of meat, with the exceptions being when I’m in the Philippines or if I’m at Jollibee. **It’s settled, two rounds of Jolly spaghetti, in honor of Anthony Bourdain, of course. Now we've got that in, what’s going on with you right now? What’s new?** I am currently making my way through the entries for the National Geographic Traveller’s Photography Competition. I’m a judge this year, which is pretty cool and exciting. But when I’m not judging, I’m trying to survive the freelance life. ## “I want to be in positions where I can affect change.” **Let’s talk about judging people. Take me behind the scenes of this career milestone — what does it mean to be a judge for a photography competition of this caliber? Judge Celeste does, indeed, sound correct to me.** I love that. Yes, as an extremely judgmental person, it feels like an honor to have a platform to judge people on a widely perceivable basis. [Laughter on both sides of this table!] But seriously, it’s actually a little stressful because in my everyday life when I’m judging people, it’s really between me and a few select friends. Maybe a little rant on the internet. But there’s a lot more weight to considering folks in this capacity. I was anonymously a judge for another thing last year, which I’m not to talk about. It felt disorienting to have so much say in someone else’s success based on your own personal interaction with something. Because the way people see things is so different. What’s striking to me won’t necessarily be striking to everyone else, and yet I get to be a person that helps decide if this person receives accolades or recognition for something. We all have our own eyes where we see things differently, but it’s a weighty feeling to me. It makes me wonder if people who are more often in these positions take it seriously enough. **You are fabulously worthy of such a judicial appointment. But I feel you. Personally, the only line I can draw to the experience that you’re going through right now was that I happened to be a judge of a drag pageant at Darcelle XV Showplace in Portland. Like a decade ago. Clearly, National Geographic Traveller is far more important.** No, those are equally important. Celeste Noche is pictured with the real camera. Noche took the other photo of Shadel, who is pictured with a wooden camera. The wooden camera is Noche's kiddo's toy. It also is appropriately suited to Shadel's skill level. **OK, if you insist. I think my point is, as you said, I adore judging people, and yet, I imagine we both aspire to be very fair judges, right? But as you were describing, there are a lot of nuances to what that entails — it’s not like you get to fix everything that’s wrong with the industry.** Exactly. I want to be in these positions where I can help affect change and bring in other perspectives. Because historically, those spaces haven’t reflected people like us. At the same time, it’s a weird sensation when you’re being asked to judge a major competition and still editors at those same kinds of institutions aren’t responding to your pitches. There is this perceived idea of prestige and recognition. And yet a lot of the same barriers still exist. It’s like “Congratulations! You’re a judge!” But I have to remind myself that it’s not all of a sudden you’re respected within your industry. The industry still isn’t treating me differently. ## “It feels like a race to the bottom. We continue to devalue art and creativity.” **What I so admire about you is not only your ethical perspective on the world and how justice informs your work —****your photos are just so goddamn good****! You really invite the viewer to jump into these moments with you. What, in your mind, makes good editorial photography, especially in the travel space?** It’s fascinating to consider editorial specifically because I’ve noticed there’s been a lot more blurring between editorial and commercial work. Sometimes I can’t see the difference. Commercial work often has more budget and can create an exact moment in a specific way that editorial is trying to do but doesn’t always have the ability to. But in the context of pure editorial, what strikes me is the feeling of connection. It should make you feel something. Certainly, happiness is a feeling. But there’s a broader range of emotions that photos can elicit — surprise, curiosity, some sense of humanity you might not see represented elsewhere in the same way. I want to feel like I’m connecting to a specific person, a specific moment, a place in a way that feels immersive. **Yes! This seems like a good point to, ahem, open the library for a moment of _reading_ — do you agree that there’s a crisis of taste in our times? “AI” photography slop, trend-chasing brands without a clear identity, the lack of funding for substance in media — these all seem to be signs pointing to, among many “bad things,” collectively bad taste?** It feels like a race to the bottom. We continue to devalue art and creativity. We’re reducing what we see and consume and interact with to more and more mimicry of art or creativity, but in fact it’s neither — just algorithmic placeholders. There are so many incredible artists doing really interesting work, but broadly, with “AI,” it feels like we value art less and less. With such devaluation, I wonder: do we really need this technology? To me, the use of “AI” for art is just weird— it feels like people are trying to play god in some way, where they can create a moment in any capacity with unlimited resources. But they think it doesn’t come at a cost, but it comes at the cost of our community. A photo of Celeste Noche taking a photo of the exterior of the castle in Scotland. **Boom. That’s the mic-drop moment. Obviously, the thing leading up to our luncheon that's been all across our feeds is the launch of OpenAI’s 4o image generation capabilities, which, it promises is “capable of precise, accurate, photorealistic outputs.” What it’s led to is fake photos and videos that look scarily real — but are not. What’s your take on that as a working photographer in this****austere creative economy****?** On one hand people are like, “look how far we’ve come with this technology!” But, again, I don’t see that as a technology we necessarily need. To your point, all of this not only devalues human labor but actually takes from human labor to create these things. Some are celebrating it like it’s magic, but it still comes at the expense and exploitation of work that already exists. The celebration completely disregards that aspect of artist exploitation and devaluation. Using it as an excuse to avoid engaging and supporting commissioned artists or creatives isn’t the way. It feels deeply misdirected. ## “It’s a question I constantly come back to: how can we make real creative livelihoods more accessible?” **Has that changed the way you’re thinking about your own craft?** It’s a question I constantly come back to: how can we make real creative livelihoods more feasible and accessible to people? It shouldn’t have to be a struggle. This relates to my work with Portland In Color, my nonprofit. But it’s also something I’m personally dealing with all the time. I don’t know how I can be 11 years into freelancing and still so completely uncertain. I know my work is valuable and I have something to contribute to the medium, but, for instance, I did a job in September and didn’t get paid until March. How is this still OK? That’s the big question, really. **I do feel like that’s the bigger question hovering above all of this, isn’t it? It’s not like “AI” is an entirely new pressure. It’s repeating and accelerating other patterns of exploitation and devaluing of creative work that aren’t new. It massively scales the massively wrong idea that creative work doesn’t deserve to be paid for in the same way as other work.** Yes, that’s it: How is this still OK?! That’s the question we all need to be asking our industry more loudly. **I was chatting with a fashion photographer back in March whose client was****an allegedly “sustainable” fashion brand who said they were lowering their carbon footprint by replacing the photographer with synthetic image generation****. The photographer was afraid to speak much about it because they didn’t want to hinder their career. So, a lot of people who are concerned about this aren’t always expressing it publicly?** Yeah, absolutely. There’s such a perception of trying to be palatable and ahead of the curve and engaged with technology. And in the past, that was one way you could improve your profitability. But right now, it feels morally bankrupt, honestly. ## Get the weekly briefing JD Shadel's ESC KEY .CO is read by terminally online pros like you who, like, totally need to log off more. Join us! Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. No crypto. Unsubscribe if you hate it. **There are a lot of morally bankrupt things happening in the world right now. But I also wanted to ask if there’s anything that’s giving you life or hope, even if it’s a small thing?** As things continue to get worse, seeing the sanctity of our own home spaces becomes more evident to me as a person who is usually all over the place. No one ever knows where I am. Folks have joked I should create a “Where in the World Is Celeste?” website a la “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” It's my kiddo, my home, my garden. I’m valuing my time at home differently than I have in the past because it feels so protected and a place I’m marginally more in control of. I’m learning from my kid, and my kid is affecting who I become as a person. We have this space to be in nature. My garden is really important to me. _🍴🍴🍴_ **Dessert is always a good idea, right?** It’s got to be the peach mango pie. And in true Filipino fashion, we’re going to get five or so more to go.

## The thing is: In early February, the world’s favorite feathered mascot for a language learning app was reportedly killed when struck by a Tesla Cybertruck. But two weeks later, it was revealed the viral social media campaign was a hoax — the make-believe owl named Duo was not, in fact, dead. It was a stunt to drive engagement in the Duolingo app. _Duo the Owl returned _gym-bro buff__, rising at 3:30 a.m. for their morning routine: a beak dunk in lemon ice water; pecking a few bananas; smearing a banana peel on their face; and then getting hooting on a podcast by 4 a.m. Duo’s mantra, per the Instagram caption, was “Rise and Grind.” **Perhaps the owl mascot was now the one driving the Cybertruck?** ## Get the weekly briefing JD Shadel's ESC KEY .CO is read by terminally online pros like you who, like, totally need to log off more. Join us! Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. No crypto. Unsubscribe if you hate it. As we learned last week from CEO and billionaire Luis von Ahn’s memo, he announced **Duolingo has evolved into a so-called “AI-first company.” (Whatever that means.)** Ergo, the “rise and grind” mantra would seem to imply employees are forced to wake up and use “AI” a lot, like it or not — they’ve got to dunk their beaks in the ice water and then get straight to prompt engineering. Or else. No silly business! **Not only is it mandatory; you’ll be judged on your adoption in performance reviews by both your boss and peers.** **In that light, it’s hard _not_ to see the once beloved Duo the Owl resurrected as an “AI” cop in the office, perched on every employee’s shoulder to surveil and then enforce the mandatory use of “AI” tools**, which the CEO has likely sunk a lot of money into and wants to show shareholders he’s on the bandwagon and “delivering.” (_Cue Ed Zitron saying “bubble” for good reason._) First on the chopping block? **“We’ll gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,”** von Ahn wrote in the memo. And if managers want to hire anyone new? **“Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”** I’ve been tracking the creep of this creative career crisis over the past several years. Indeed, **this is merely the latest episode in what I somewhat satirically dubbed the “**** _age of AI-sterity_****” back in January here on ESC KEY .CO**. That’s because the desire has always been there. But now the tech has caught up to the boss’s wet dreams. As I wrote then: > _“This is where the current state of ‘AI’ hype shows its teeth:**It’s not ‘good enough’ to actually replace human creativity. But disrupt the entire industry funding this work? It’s potentially ‘good enough’ for that.** From the perspective of people writing the checks for a lot of the paying work, the synthetic media is ‘good enough’ and ‘getting better.’ For example, it’s been good enough for numerous brands and trend agencies to replace freelance budgets with chatbots; ‘good enough’ for one of the world’s most profitable design companies to use synthetic media generators instead of hiring designers and illustrators; ‘good enough’ for trends consultancies to replace junior analysts; ‘good enough’ for leading advertising agencies to employ ‘AI’ at scale across accounts; ‘good enough,’ even, for well-followed Substackers who write about the importance of freelance job protections to skip paying for stock imagery and instead run with synthetic cartoons. That’s the internet today.”_ The Duolingo news trended on LinkedIn recently, but the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based tech company is certainly not alone. **It’s only the latest of many that have publicly or privately mandated the use of different “AI” tools — typically large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots that might inadequately replace, say, copywriters.** For instance, on April 7, _Shopify CEO posted to X a similar internal memo_, which had been leaked. His new rules made clear that using such tools was now a “fundamental expectation” of all employees — something, he said, “I don’t believe it’s feasible to opt out of.” **In other words, use it or you’ll inevitably be fired.** A la return-to-office mandates after the tech world’s celebrated remote work norms during and shortly after lockdowns. A la the automated austerity pursued by Elon Musk and the DOGE team, which is exploring rolling out so-called “AI agents” throughout the U.S. federal government, _as WIRED reported on Friday_. **A la as nonconsensual as an unsolicited dick pic when you can’t even load Gmail without unwanted Gemini intrusions.** ## The thing about that is: Some of these bosses started with an invitation to experiment. **But their message is now coercion, a threat that if you don’t get in line, you’re the next out the door.** Indeed, midway through writing this briefing, tech journalist Brian Merchant published a piece in his always on-point newsletter, _Blood in the Machine_, where he concluded that “the AI jobs crisis is here.” While Duolingo’s CEO had said “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI,” one contractor told Merchant that this was spin. _Job cuts had already been taking place_. Merchant reported: “The translators were laid off in 2023, the writers six months ago, in October 2024.” “If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you that my job would become more and more editing AI content,” Merchant quoted the contractor — indeed, a writer. **“I did not expect to be replaced so soon.”** **The workplace messaging around “AI” has evolved dramatically in the last three years from “augmenting” human creativity to outright replacement.**_As I reported in January, focused on the examples in creative fields, this was always inevitable_. For ESC readers who spend much of our careers online, **the net-negative intrusion of LLMs into the internet is clearly visibl** e: content marketing slop for the corporate blog and the CEO’s LinkedIn “thought leadership” posts has gotten sloppier; Google’s search integrity has been pierced with bullshitting “AI Overviews” (_“bullshit” in this case is an academic term_); and _social media has been overrun with synthetic action figures_ of your colleagues, among other adventures in bad synthetic imagery. Unless your primary goal in life is “ _vibe coding_” or _SEO spamming_ or generating synthetic images of _Shrimp Jesus for Facebook_, the results are so far “meh.” Sure, spammers are highly more productive than in the past, yes. _Deep-fakers are far more effective at creating non-consensual porn of Taylor Swift_, sure. And knowledge workers of all stripes feel their careers are more precarious, but the output is _not cute._ **Certainly, Big Tech companies benefit from this narrative of career displacement.** They profit from selling technology that is a poor replacement for creative work, but the managerial class — the business guys — they’re buying it hook, line and sinker. **Because those guys never really cared about your creative work in the first place. “Democratizing creativity” was always a grandiose lie, a smart PR strategy and harmful to the actual market for creativity**. It’s a familiar pattern of automation for the benefit of shareholders and managers, only now with a more technologically mesmerizing and _environmentally harmful_ way of achieving those ends at a much greater scale. Ultimately, it’s austerity on steroids. Much of what we published on ESC about “ _AI-sterity_” in January continues to come to pass: > _“There will likely be some new jobs for folks who want to more or less spend their working days prompting a synthetic media generator to produce stuff that actual human creatives could do without the tool. In my experience using these tools, there’s little in the way of efficiencies. And it goes without saying that these tools don’t generate out of the blue — they were trained on immense data sets, on the media created by human labor — the subject of numerous lawsuits alleging mass and knowing copyright violations under the cynical label of fair use.**Worse, this all comes at a time when the creative industries are already against the wall.** ”_ ## Where things get interesting: In its recent “AI-first” LinkedIn post, Duolingo declared on its social media: “Just like how betting on mobile in 2012 made all the difference, we’re making a similar call now. This time the platform shift is AI.” **And yet, the platform shift metaphors tech companies want to evoke about their mandatory adoption of “AI” don’t really hold water.** Despite addictive apps and dark design patterns, phones do objectively useful things. They are a very specific kind of tool, as frustrating as they can be. Such comparisons to mobile phones are similar to others “AI” grifters invoke about prior tech advancements. In this early March briefing on _cognitive offloading_, I picked apart one such claim that pocket-size electronic calculators were a point of contention in educational settings in the 20th century; yet mathematicians still exist. **But the contradictions collapse under any scrutiny:** > _“Calculators operate in a narrow, deterministic domain where answers are objectively right or wrong. They’re perfect at their limited tasks. LLMs, by contrast, are not operating in narrow, deterministic domains. They produce probabilistic outputs that can be convincing yet incorrect often enough to be unreliable.**And a certain level of incorrectness is inherent to the way LLM-driven tools and services work.** ”_ **It’s fair to ask, if large language models are as “innovative,” “disruptive” and “transformative” as they are claimed to be, why are they being forced down everyone’s throats?** Even where bosses aren’t mandating its use, it’s thrust non-consensually in almost every web- and mobile-enabled product out there from search to word processing apps. Most office productivity suites such as Google Workspace have raised their monthly fees due to the inclusion of “AI” features. **Sure, you don’t have to use those features, but you will have to pay Big Tech for them.** As Benj Edwards recently reported in Ars Technica, one noteworthy study on productivity of 7,000 workplaces in Denmark found inconclusive results of LLM adoption in professional settings. In some fields, LLMs have even created additional labor, offsetting time any potential time-savings. **In my use case, LLMs’ incorrectness makes them unfit for purpose for the majority of tasks that I, a professional writer, must do to craft credible reports, essays and, yes, briefings.** Even chatbot copyediting is unreliable to the point of uselessness — seemingly a task many writers feel comfortable outsourcing to “AI.” More often, when you upload a draft to a chatbot, it’ll correctly catch a few errors, miss others and almost always bullshit a percentage of non-existent errors for you to correct, but the errors aren’t in the text. That’s, again, because chatbots do not understand. They cannot replace human editors or copyeditors. Don’t even get me started on their unfitness for “fact-checking.” And yet, the drivel text is deemed “good enough” to publish with minimal human intervention by bosses who are not professional writers. (They’d rather cut us out of the process before another creative or editorial team unionizes.) For these reasons, even the technical employees who haven’t been laid off remain to face the “AI” mandates with growing frustration. **They find themselves forced to perform a new kind of productivity theatre to show the managers that they’re attaining the prophesied efficiencies, even when that might not be possible.** One redditor put it bluntly in the r/ExperiencedDevs subreddit: > _“This AI forced adoption trend is just the newest thing in a long history of businesses trying to do anything and everything to eliminate labor costs, and of then chasing the magic formula that generates money from nothing. The pressure to essentially commit fraud by writing down an amount of ‘time saved,’ regardless of if any time was saved, is just another effort in a long history of management trying to justify gigantic rewards for themselves.”_ This was one of many replies in a seven-month-old _thread where a frustrated developer complained that their company was “forcing” them to use “AI,”_ then to account for productivity gains (even if there weren’t any). “There are these weird expectations of becoming 10x with the use of AI and you are supposed to show the efficiency to live up to these expectations,” the OP said. (Setting aside the umbrella use of the term “AI” here, one of several red flags investigative reporter Karen Hao shared with ESC KEY .CO in March in _this curious reader’s guide to hypebusting the bullshit_. Below, the quoted redditors generally refer to LLM chatbots and coding tools.) One redditor replied bluntly: > _“**I'm guessing ‘hours saved’ will be roughly the same amount of ‘hours wasted’ recording the savings in time.** ”_ Yet another added: > _“These tools don't automatically improve productivity, and certainly not for all people at all levels.**The amount of time saved could be very small or even negative for an experienced dev.** For less experienced devs, it means they can produce more (arguably bad) code in less time, which just means senior devs will need to spend more time reviewing their work. [...] I felt I spent more time reviewing what was produced for problems than it saved me in coding. **The ROI just isn't there.** ”_ The kicker may be this one: > _“**From your description it even sounds as if your management was trying to prepare justification for lay-offs** (‘AI saves us 20% of effort so 20% of IT staff can be laid off’), so I wouldn't just lie about the benefits of the AI-based tools at your disposal.”_ ## The thing to talk about over your next power lunch: From years of extensive cognitive behavioral therapy, I’ve learned about reassurance seeking — the compulsive habit of repeatedly seeking validation to reduce anxiety and seek some semblance of security. Early in my career, I struggled with this in both professional and personal settings, constantly needing confirmation that what I was bringing to the table was adequate. While constructive feedback remains valuable, without doubt, there’s a fine line between that and the dependency of constant validation. I, _well_ , _worry_ that the rollout of chatbots into the workplace achieves less in the way of efficiency and more in learned dependencies, promoting a new kind of algorithmically enabled reassurance seeking and cognitively offloading essential human tasks from information literacy through to, hell, _maybe even flirting on dating apps_. In the context of search, for instance, chatbot interfaces mean we lose the beneficial “friction,” as examined by scholars Chirag Shah and Emily M. Bender in a _2024 paper on the subject_. Chatbots in a workplace setting may not lead to the same kind of emotional dependencies that _lonely individuals have formed with startup LLM-driven intimate chat companion services such as Replika_ and Character.AI, the latter which a _mother in Florida alleged pushed her 14-year-old son to commit suicide_. But what happens when, say, a young writer is targeted extensively by _OpenAI’s first big advertisement push geared toward 2025’s college students_? Rather than attaining productivity, are we merely creating an environment where too many people can’t write without a chatbot, can’t code without a co-pilot, can’t find the flaws in all the synthetic drivel because they never learned to do so in the first place? As one redditor on r/ExperiencedDevs put it best: “Gotta love it when people who don't know how to do your job mandate how you do your job.” All the while, if you want bullshit made up, why not pay a creative writer? Our rates have hardly risen since the 2010s, so I’m confident one of us can work with your budget. Look, I’m glad the owl lived. But efficiency’s only great until it costs you everything that made the work worth doing. ## And one long thing to read: This TL;DR Briefing includes analysis from this January ESC KEY .CO long-read, when we coined the silly word AI-sterity: The age of AI-sterity: that’s austerity but now with “AI” (oh and you’re fired!)In the inaugural Hype Ball column, we’re doing critical tech analysis but making it drag — sifting through the spin from the “AI” grifters to get to the sinister austerity lurking behind the false “democratizing creativity” claims.ESC KEY .COJD Shadel

## **Act I. The state of lunch: An unhinged Q1.3 salad monologue** **Tiny Desk Salad is not a production of NPR** , nor does Tiny Desk Salad have any relationship with NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts. To be honest, I don’t know if I’m legally obliged to tell you that. I am simply trying to, ahem, _elevate_ this lonely dish of greens sitting here by my keyboard. A question I’ve been asking myself a lot this year is, how can I inspire anyone to have more intellectually fulfilling lunches if I am, indeed, a lunch con artist? As you may know too well, dear reader, every week at ESC KEY .CO one part of my mission is to give you “ _something worth discussing over your next power lunch_.” I write that with a knowing _wink_ , sure. But there’s earnestness there, too. **And yet, more than three months into this operation, I need to make a sincere confession: I feel like I’m a lunch fraud!** Imposter lunch syndrome, if you will! Here I am a few forkfuls into spring mix — alone! Power lunch?! It’s a complicated business! Just as some Tiny Desk Concerts live on a loop in my mind whenever I feel a little wistfully nostalgic — such as The Cranberries’ hauntingly perfect 2012 desk-side performance — the same is true for the interviews that I’ve conducted since mid-January's soft launch of ESC KEY .CO. When I’m hustling alone at my desk, unfocused and staring off into the distance, I think back on these stimulating conversations, a fantasy group lunch I’m not having but _could_ be in theory: **Ergo** , **I term that disconnect — between this Tiny Desk Salad and the fantasy****Power Lunch****— _the Great Lunch Gap_.** **Imagine a power lunch combining brilliant chats with the likes of****_Karen Hao_****(co-lead on the Pulitzer Center’s “AI Spotlight Series”),****_Oliver Haimson_****(author of the MIT Press open-access book “**** _Trans Technologies_****”),****_the Internet Archive’s Chris Freeland_****and many more.** All at one table. _Aspirational_ lunch dates. I sit alone, dreaming. For journalists, interviews with sources like these are kind of like our own private Tiny Desk lecture series. You slouch over the little desk in a humid, sauna-like phone booth. You close the little door. You join a remote video call with smart people, big names, total baddies. They share their expertise, their life work, their quotable one-liners. Then the call ends. You hear things so interesting you want to tell your friends over lunch. **But here I am not making enough time in my own life for the long, chatty lunches I preach about?!** (This is a note to self to schedule that lunch with that friend you've been meaning to text back.) **Indeed, we live in an era of digital discontent;** productivity porn; over-optimizing every area of our lives to such a great degree that a lazy, carb-y, maybe bottle-of-something-fueled lunch with pals can sometimes feel like a rare luxury. If work keeps you online, it can feel like you’re never off. You’re picking at baby spinach at your desk to get ahead on that Q2 thing. But you're not ahead. Sure, you might’ve recently completed _The Guardian’s “reclaim your brain” five-week phone detox newsletter series_, which is depressingly insightful. You are clearly concerned with your screen time but have struggled to lower it because you’re addicted to refreshing your inbox, your Slack threads, your dating apps because who isn’t a little lonely right now?**As a result, you feel a little over-extended, over-worked,_over_ being alone. ** **Look, sometimes the hustle is worth it. I reject doomerism.** Time online can be rewarding, too. Parrot videos on TikTok are cute. The internet, as bad as the vibes are right now, can still be a place for independent voices to find an audience and for us to hang out in some federated server with cool pals we might not have met in person (you know who you are). It is worth it when it’s in service of something substantive and fun. The key isn’t necessarily moving to an off-the-grid, wind-powered castle in the Scottish Highlands (though it might be). It’s to find _repeatable_ ways to Keep Enjoying Yourself (equals KEY). For instance, maybe you’ve recently launched a new media outlet and you’re truly enjoying it. In fact, maybe **you’ve published** **more than 75,000 words you wrote** (and **republished 12,000 words by the late Paul Lafargue**). And even so, maybe it’s cutting into your social life a tad more than you’d like to admit? **When you’re the Chief Editorial Officer and a team of one, whose fault is that, really?** No, you are not solely responsible for the macro-economic forces that make work feel precarious and a social lunch feel impossible.**** But you also have _some_ agency. There’s only one lunch a day. **Lunch won’t make time for you unless you make time for it.** The sick irony is that abandoning life’s small pleasures, your “monk mode,” your “raw-dogging,” your glorification of the time you invest in skipping nourishing lunches doesn’t even make you more productive. **Reclaiming your brain is a good idea. It’s also hard. Maybe one place we can start is reclaiming our lunch?** **_That friend waiting on a response from JD interrupts this Q1.3 report on reclaiming lunch:_ “Come to lunch with me, JD?!”** _Immense guilt settles in and JD’s voice cracks:_ Oh, sorry, I really want to lunch but I need to write my newsletter today, the next one is, um, about the importance of lunching! **“Who cares? Who reads? Why are you working so much on this newsletter?! Wasn’t the****_title of Katherine Cross’s book ‘Log Off,’ anyway_****?! Didn’t you call it ‘almost prophetic, hands-down the smartest book I’ve read about social media so far this decade’? Have you tried _logging off?!_ ”** _JD snaps. They’ve not been sleeping enough:_ Who, um, reads?! Really?!! WELL IF YOU’D HAVE READ _THE VERY LONG ABOUT PAGE_, IT’S A NEWSLETTER FOR VERY ONLINE PEOPLE WHO VERY MUCH WANT TO BE OFFLINE BUT OFTEN FEEL LIKE WE CANNOT! **“JD, calm down. It was a joke. Why the all-caps?****_Another absurd series of acronyms?!_****You’re lunching solo. I am merely your nagging conscience.”** Oh. Always connected. Seemingly more alone than ever. _But_ with choices I can make. Taking time for an intellectually stimulating lunch is _clearly_ not the whole solution, but guarding your lunch break is one thing you can do to inject a little life into your days. For instance, during recent solo luncheons, I’ve recently tried to make an effort to sit outside in the sunny mid-spring courtyard at Somerset House, where ESC KEY .CO is based, reading a few pages of something fresh. But even when I’m eating at my desk, I give myself a few minutes to let my mind wander and connect the dots in my first quarter of reporting for this site. With ESC KEY .CO so far, it feels like we’ve convened a salon with smart, interesting people of different lived experiences and disciplines, yet all grappling with overlapping questions about the state of our digital discontent. **The themes that emerge give us a mental map for navigating our moment, dare I say a mental meal plan for those lunches at our desks when we’re fated to eat alone.** **Yes, lunch is a verb. Lunch with friends when you can. But feed your brain when you can’t.** The point being, you can change your lunch if you want to. It might not be easy, perfect or your power lunch fantasy. But it can be a little better. By now, you can see that lunch is a metaphor. ## **Act II. The mental meal plan for your next 9 solo lunches** **To mark ESC KEY .CO’s Q1.3, I present nine compelling things I learned this quarter from smart people.** These are nine things I keep thinking about when I’m eating alone at my desk. I refuse to call this food for thought. That would be obvious. And, ultimately, we are gathered here today to Challenge the Obvious (equals .CO). ### **_1. Karen Hao: “AI” has been a marketing term since it was coined_** When award-winning investigative reporter _Karen Hao_ traces the origin story of artificial intelligence, she begins with a remarkably candid admission from the guy who coined that term. “I invented the term artificial intelligence,” John McCarthy blurted out during a 1973 BBC debate. “I invented it because we had to do something to get money for a summer study.” As the Royal Institution audience erupted in laughter, McCarthy had unwittingly revealed back then what Hao would later tell ESC KEY .CO in March: “AI” has always been, first and foremost, a marketing term. This origin story reveals why today's “AI” discourse feels so slippery. “Over the decades since the original idea was conceived and the term was coined in the 1950s, there’s just been many different iterations of what the technology actually looks like and how it works,” Hao explains. The contemporary debate isn’t only scientific but “a business debate, a political debate, an economic debate” shaped by corporate and state actors with “very self-interested agendas.” ## “It's really hard to understand which tech you're talking about when you use the term AI.” Hao’s forthcoming book, “Empire of AI” (pre-order here, out on May 20), traces the impacts of the tech across continents. She reveals how today's “AI” economy — from engineers in Silicon Valley to data laborers in Africa to water activists in South America — recreates familiar patterns of extraction. Speaking with us about her work co-leading the Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series, which trains journalists worldwide on covering “AI” as a political and economic story, Hao shared a _framework for curious readers to cut through the hype_. One big red flag? Using ‘AI” as a catch-all term. “There are many different types of AI technologies, and it's really hard to understand which technology you're talking about when you just use the term AI,” she explained. This vague terminology obscures critical distinctions between vastly different systems with dramatically different impacts. Instead of viewing technologies as disembodied intelligence in some formless “cloud,” Hao urges us to see them as products that caause human rights and environmental impacts throughout their supply chains. That is where we can begin to de-hype the discourse in our fields. (See Hao's top red and green flags for reading about the tech in this Power Tools bookmarkable guide.) ### **_2. Oliver Haimson: Transing technology and urgently centering community needs_** “I study technology to learn more about transness, and trans identity to understand more about technology,” _Oliver Haimson told ESC KEY .CO in February_, encapsulating the revolutionary approach found in his groundbreaking book “ _Trans Technologies_” from MIT Press. At a moment when fascist currents threaten marginalized communities, Haimson's research — _interviewing more than 100 trans tech creators in a single year_ — reveals a thriving ecosystem of resistance through design. From voice training apps to healthcare directories to mutual aid platforms, these technologies aren’t mere adaptations of mainstream tools but fundamental reimaginings of what technology can be. Haimson’s work illuminates a radical proposition: that those most marginalized by mainstream tech might hold the most helpful insights on fixing what’s broken. When I asked him about this apparent irony, he offered a vision for “transing” technology that reaches far: “In transing tech, the way I'm conceptualizing it, we’re trying to turn technology into something new and different that works for people who have complex identities, people whose identities are changing. And that's not only trans people — that’s everybody.” ## “I study tech to learn more about transness, and trans identity to understand more about tech.” The book introduces a concept he terms “plasticity” to describe technologies designed for complexity, transition and transformation. Such trans technologies embrace the fundamental reality that identities shift and evolve. As government attacks on trans rights continue to intensify in the United States, United Kingdom and beyond, Haimson sees technology playing an increasingly vital role in community survival (and, also important, joy). In an industry shaped by corporate surveillance and algorithmic oppression, “Trans Technologies” offers a roadmap to something profoundly different: anti-fascist technology built from the ground up to center community needs rather than extractive profit models. (We unpack a few examples in the extra long read, alongside a deep conversation with Haimson.) ### **_3. Katherine Cross: “Log Off” and the collective illusion of activism on social media_** “There have been plenty of ‘social media is bad’ takes, but in ‘Log Off’ you have a more original and urgent message,” I told _Katherine Cross in our long-form interview_ in January, referencing her incisive book “Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix” from LittlePuss Press. Her response cuts to the core of social media's fundamental deception: the platforms trick us into believing we’re participating in meaningful collective action when we’re mostly just creating content. She speaks from experience: “I had to realize something about my own hopeful online agitations from the last ten years,” she confessed. “The main beneficiary of a lot of that online activism was _me_. I became microfamous. I got work. I met interesting people. But I really didn’t contribute to moving the needle on anything by posting.” For that, she had to log off. This insight becomes particularly resonant in the aftermath of an election where a digital hype bubble suggested to some an entirely different outcome than what materialized. ## “Memes don't vote.” Cross told me she saw the surge of enthusiasm for Harris, from coconut memes to "kamala IS brat" tweets, and momentarily felt her older hopes return. “What if I was wrong? What if this really was an organic surge of energy that portended a tidal wave?" But her instincts proved correct. “Memes don't vote,” she said bluntly. Cross’s analysis explains why: social media excels at creating individual catharsis but fails at building “any kind of ground-up organization that can, itself, reorganize society for the better.” Even the promise of decentralized social platforms — the “fediverse” that many leftist netizens fled to following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover – doesn’t escape Cross’s critical eye. While _there are obvious benefits of open protocols like those powering Bluesky_ (AT Protocol) or Mastodon (ActivityPub), Cross suggests we should remain skeptical about their potential for changing our communities and our politics for the better. A more open technical architecture doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: social media platforms, regardless of their ownership model, excel at destroying things but struggle to build them. (On the other hand, she acknowledges social media is good for jokes!) During our conversation, she recalled joining a “wonderful little server of trans women” on Mastodon that soon “collapsed in drama,” leading her to conclude, “yeah, this is not the promised land.” As Cross puts it, social media tricks us into thinking we’re achieving something political when the real work of change requires us to, again, _log off_. (More nuance and nudges to focus your efforts on your community in the extra long read, with the full Cross interview.) ### **_4. Chris Freeland: Digital archivists as democracy’s backup drive_** “Recent events have made it painfully clear how fragile our digital history is. From government data disappearing overnight to entire sites vanishing, we’re seeing critical records scrubbed from the live web in real time,” Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Internet Archive, _told ESC KEY .CO in early February_ amid reports of the new U.S. administration's aggressive purge of government websites. As federal agencies deleted more than 8,000 pages within days — scrubbing climate science research, erasing marginalized communities from federal records and even removing the word “diverse” from non-DEI related descriptions of museum collections — digital archivists had already been working tirelessly. But now they work with a heightened sense of urgency. ## “Recent events have made it painfully clear how fragile our digital history is.” The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has emerged as an essential tool for accountability journalism in this new era of censorship. When The Washington Post investigated the strategic alterations across federal websites, they relied on the Archive’s digital snapshots to document the changes. Meanwhile, the End of Term Web Archive project — a collaboration between the Internet Archive, Library of Congress, Stanford University Libraries and other institutions — preserved hundreds of terabytes of government data during the presidential transition. These archivists, often underfunded and working in obscurity, have built the infrastructure to preserve truth itself when authoritarians attempt to rewrite reality with a keystroke. “Archiving the web isn't just about nostalgia,” Freeland emphasized. “It's about ensuring that future generations have access to the data, stories and perspectives that shape our world today.” _When the Internet Archive briefly went dark after a coordinated DDoS attack in October_, it offered a chilling preview of our possible future: a digital dark age where power means the ability to press delete on any inconvenient fact. ### **_5. Alice Crossley: When algorithms ordain the group tour guides_** During her 2023 backpacking trip through Central America, Alice Crossley, senior foresight analyst at The Future Laboratory in London, noticed something curious: ordinary TikTokers were rapidly transforming from random travelers into recognized personalities simply by documenting their journeys. “They quickly became known amongst everyone traveling a similar route to them,” she told ESC KEY .CO about one content-creating pair in our first original reported feature. “They would mention in their videos how often they were recognized by fellow travelers.” This swift algorithmic coronation unlocked a curious new career path — these creators soon began organizing group trips, taking followers to their favorite destinations. The platform’s algorithm was functioning as an unlikely A&R department for the travel industry, minting new tour guides through engagement metrics. This phenomenon revealed what Crossley termed “hyper-relatable digital collectives” — influence built on a new iteration of _parasocial intimacy_. “Through watching the creator's TikToks, the traveler has a parasocial intimacy with the creator, which makes them feel more comfortable joining a group of strangers for a trip to the other side of the world,” she explained. This comfort with virtual strangers is especially meaningful in our post-pandemic context, where many young people lost coming-of-age years to lockdowns. As Crossley observed, some internet strangers saw group travel with content creators as “the perfect antidote to years of COVID isolation.” The creator’s feed doubles as a shoppable moodboard, offering not just destinations but potential social connections, creating a flywheel where content begets group travel begets more content — all ordained by algorithms that remain a black box. ### **_6. Andy Crysell: How “offline” became a nightlife #sponcon marketing campaign_** Imagine this: you’re at Amsterdam Dance Event 2024, ready to film Scottish DJ Barry Can't Swim’s set, when an invisible infrared message suddenly appears on your phone screen, blocking the camera and advertising an app called The Boring Mode. Welcome to nightlife’s latest revolt against our always-on, always-documenting culture. The surreal twist, of course, is that this digital détournement is itself an advertisement for Heineken. This tension between community and commercialization stands at the heart of _Andy Crysell’s fascinating new book, “Selling the Night,”_ which documents the fraught terrain where underground culture meets corporate cash. The stakes couldn't be higher. All clubs in the United Kingdom could close by 2030 if nothing changes, according to trade group predictions, with the current rate of venues closing at three per week. Meanwhile, brands chase cultural relevance through increasingly absurd stunts — who can forget the DJ wearing a massive Colonel Sanders helmet at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in 2019? As Crysell told ESC KEY .CO recently, “When you look at the creative industries in honesty, it really is about a handful of very large corporations that rule it. The money is not being evenly distributed. It is tending to create very monocultural outputs.” ## “Corporatization is tending to create very monocultural outputs.” One paradox in “Selling the Night” that Crysell maps is how it is now _aspirational_ to be offline — itself almost a false binary in our always-online culture. It is so widely felt that the insight has trickled up to the C-suite, where it is becoming marketing campaigns. Heineken also launched a branded dumbphone, aka The Boring Phone. The desire to escape digital saturation has become both genuine yearning and profitable marketing angle. Meanwhile, the question threading through the underground in cities like New York and London is, who can afford to resist “selling out” when gentrification and rising costs make throwing parties and running clubs increasingly a rich kid's game? Yet despite the commercialization pressures, phone bans spreading from Berlin's techno temples to intimate East London bars, and the persistent doom-saying, Crysell maintains qualified optimism: “I wouldn't bet against the appeal of people getting together in a space to dance to some loud music.” (We zoom in and out on the state of nightlife in the long-read.) ### **_7. Tiara Darnell: The philosophy of figuring out what’s next in this creative economy_** “I think about all the dreams I had as a teenager — what are the things you wanted when you were unencumbered and the world hadn't completely jaded you yet? Have you actually accomplished those things, or did they get buried somewhere along the way?” This question, _posed by Tiara Darnell during our first in the Power Lunch profile series_, has haunted me as I’ve forked through a few sad desk salads. And Darnell should know. At 36, she’s lived several dream lives already: Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, wine and cannabis pro in Oregon, Spotify producer, and most recently, founder of Blaxicocina, Mexico City’s first Black American soul food restaurant. When I caught up with her, she was in Belo Horizonte, Brazil — yet another reinvention in progress after closing her acclaimed restaurant in December after two hustling years. ## “What are the things you wanted when you were unencumbered and the world hadn't completely jaded you?” The remarkable thing about Darnell isn’t just what she’s accomplished, but the clarity with which she sees the entrepreneurial path many fantasize about. “This idea that entrepreneurship means escaping the nine-to-five is so far from the reality. You’re actually trading your nine-to-five for a twenty-four-seven schedule,” she told me recently. Her reflections on being an American in Mexico City during its era of overnomadism is particularly timely. “There's this level of privilege that we experience. We're not immigrants like ‘my life has been so hard that I will risk everything to come to this country for a better life,’” she acknowledged. “To be a Black American in Mexico is to breathe new energy into your life. It feels good to be somewhere where your humanity is acknowledged and you can just be at ease and exist, relatively unburdened, in a way that doesn’t really happen in the U.S. But it’s something I feel deeply conflicted about — we’ve built something special over these last few years especially, but like any immigrant community, we’re making our own bubble.” Darnell’s particular genius lies in how she’s embracing both achievement and its aftermath – the question that looms when you've ticked off your teenage dreams: now what? (This first in the Power Lunch series resonated with readers, so pull up a chair here.) ### **_8. Mel Anyamene: Building travel collectives beyond the TikTok taste clusters_** “There's a lot of stigma around visiting certain places and concerns about how people of color might be treated,” Mel Anyamene, co-founder of Out of Office Collective (OOOC), told ESC KEY .CO when discussing the motivation behind their group travel organization. While many content creators have leveraged algorithmic attention to simply monetize their followings, OOOC represents something more intentional — a response to the marginalization many travelers experience within the mainstream industry. The collective has evolved beyond typical influence-driven models, focusing on creating secure environments for underserved audiences. “Even if you choose to explore independently during the day, you always have a tribe to return to at the hotel — a tribe where you can feel safe, seen and understood,” Anyamene explained. ## “There's a lot of stigma around visiting certain places and concerns about how people of color might be treated.” What distinguishes OOOC from conventional group travel platforms is its emphasis on community-building rather than just monetization. “I wouldn't exactly say we're a travel agency. I feel like ‘travel agency’ gives the impression of just booking travel for people, when it's more collaborative than that — it’s a co-creation,” Anyamene says. Their approach emerged directly from audience demand: “Growing my TikTok page has shown me just how many people dream of traveling but feel held back — whether by fear, lack of knowledge or uncertainty about where to start. I frequently get messages from people asking to join me on trips.” This connection between digital influence and real-world gatherings underscores a broader shift in how communities form in the algorithmic age. Unlike many content creators who stumble into group travel through viral luck, OOOC represents a more deliberate model, using TikTok not just as a promotional channel but as a way “to get things out to people based on what they like” – leveraging the algorithm’s clustering abilities while working toward something more substantial than fleeting digital fame. ### **_9. Paul Lafargue: Behold, the Prophet of Leisure!_** OK, full disclosure: I didn't actually speak with Paul Lafargue, given that he wrote “The Right to Be Lazy” from Paris’s Saint-Pélagie Prison in 1883. Yet his voice echoes with unnerving relevance across nearly a century and a half, becoming the first selection in _ESC KEY .CO’s newly announced Public Domain Reading Club_. Lafargue’s pamphlet, which we've republished in full, reads like the footnotes to our contemporary discourses on burnout, quiet quitting and yes, “ _AI-sterity_.” His central insight: While machines should in theory make labor easier, Lafargue argues that in practice they're ultimately not really doing that (i.e., the productivity gains don't give you more time off; they increase profitability). Sure, his focus was on the Second Industrial Revolution. But it is strikingly relevant. _As I wrote last week_, while Musk tells us “AI” might eliminate the need for jobs entirely, his Department of Government Efficiency slashes federal positions in the name of optimization. The tools change; the power dynamics and the hype remain much the same. Even if there's no _right_ to be lazy right now, the least we can do is make time for a nice, long, chatty lunch with real-life friends from time to time — so, yeah, text them back, babes! ## **Act III. This GIF where a diabolical fork makes the spoon quite anxious (we’ve all been spoon!)**

## The thing is: How many times have you looked at some modern problem and thought, _hm_ , that's not exactly new though, is it? For instance, maybe you’re a freelancer who lived through the Great Recession, which makes the current age of “ _AI-sterity_” feel a bit déjà vu — another “pivot” further devoid of humanity? We journalists would often say in the early aughts, “print dollars are digital dimes,” referring to tanking ad revenues that led to more layoffs. Maybe those digital dimes are now “AI” pennies, as bosses think they can use bullshitting chatbots to replace human writers? That is, after all, happening all around. Our current predicaments often feel like new iterations of the same underlying dynamics, particularly when it comes to technology, work and power. That’s why I’m stoked to unveil the first selection in the new **Public Domain Reading Club** : Paul Lafargue’s **“****The Right to Be Lazy****”** (1883), a short book that feels shockingly relevant to our current era. The title is, yes, a little click-baity. His argument isn’t really about doing nothing with our lives, but rather about who benefits from all this overwork and how we might change that. Today, we’ve published the full pamphlet in its original translation directly on ESC KEY .CO. This briefing touches on the key ideas you need to know even if you don’t want to read the whole thing (but c’mon, pal — it won’t be a reading club without _thee_!). ## Get the weekly briefing JD Shadel's ESC KEY .CO is read by terminally online pros like you who, like, totally need to log off more. Join us! Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. No crypto. Unsubscribe if you hate it. Written from the notorious Saint-Pélagie Prison in Paris by Karl Marx’s son-in-law, this witty polemic begins with a paradox: workers have been conditioned to maintain their own exploitation. While machines should in theory make labor easier, Lafargue argues that in practice they're ultimately transformed into tools that intensify human toil (i.e., the productivity gains don't give you more time off; they increase profitability). **The working classes, he writes, have been deluded into serving a system that treats them as disposable.** Arguably, any creative and knowledge worker today probably relates to some of that. You don’t need to self-identify as a Marxist, or ever have read anything by Lafargue’s father-in-law, to see how that analysis maps to much of what's wrong with work today. **In short, his argument goes that machines are only our saviors if the time they save us goes toward giving us more time to live.** The first couple of chapters drag a bit. But the most striking passages come in chapter three, where Lafargue gets into the automation paradox: > “The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men” (and, like, everyone regardless of gender). He hits hard. He notes that while a knitting machine produces “30,000 [meshes] in the same time” as a worker’s five, giving workers “ten days of rest” for every minute of machine labor, the opposite occurs in practice: > “In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, **instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!** ” ## The thing about that is: Lafargue was born in Cuba to a family with Jamaican, Haitian, French and Jewish heritage. After moving to France and later London, he met and married Karl Marx’s daughter, Laura. Yet Lafargue faced racism within leftist circles. As Nicholas Burman wrote in Tribune magazine in a 2022 retrospective, “both Friedrich] Engels and Marx supported Lafargue, and Lafargue played an indispensable role in popularizing Marxism in France,” _and yet_ “the two would dehumanize Lafargue by using ethnic slurs when referring to him. [**_Lafargue’s mixed-race status appears to have been used against him to delegitimize his role in the development of the left_****.** ” This historical sidelining partly explains why “The Right to Be Lazy” isn’t as canonical as it might’ve otherwise been. Lafargue was writing during the Second Industrial Revolution, when mechanization was transforming European economies and concentrating wealth in unprecedented ways. Factories were implementing new systems that could produce goods at staggering rates, yet **workers found themselves laboring longer hours rather than enjoying the fruits of this productivity.** The paradox Lafargue identified remains with us today, even as labor movements have achieved much: technological advancement fails to deliver on the repeated promises of reducing human toil. As _Idler magazine_ editor Tom Hodgkinson (aka “ _the hardest working man in slow business_”) observed in a _2023 interview about Lafargue’s work_: > “Technology always announces itself as, you know, we’re going to free you from toils so you have more time to do the things that you love. And then, in fact, the opposite happens and people end up working longer and longer hours and being more and more tired.” This pattern repeats with remarkable consistency. **The economic gains from improved productivity rarely trickle down to workers in the form of shorter hours or better conditions** (that is, not without considerable labor organizing for, say, five-day workweeks and eight-hour workdays). Instead, we get mass layoffs, more lavish sacrifices to the god of “optimization” and our surveillants’ expectation that we should always be available. Earlier this month, CEO Tobias Lütke said _Shopify won’t hire anyone unless a manager can prove that “AI” can’t do the job_ (well, _*shrug,*_ we shall see how well that goes). What’s even more striking is how thoroughly this system has trained us to embrace our own exhaustion as virtue — the delusion Lafargue called “the furious passion for work.” ## Where things get interesting: We’re living through what the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab has dubbed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” characterized by “AI,” automation and digital platforms. Yet the patterns Lafargue identified remain remarkably consistent even in this latest season. The automation paradox has simply found new expressions in our terminally online era. We’re in a surreal moment where _broligarchs_ like Elon Musk say things like “AI” represents “the most disruptive force in history” that _might lead to a “point where no job is needed,”_ as Musk told British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023. **Yet these rosy pronouncements stand in stark contrast to Musk’s policies.** In leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he’s implementing “AI-sterity” and mass layoffs throughout the federal government. As Charlie Warzel noted in The Atlantic, this amounts to a “ _bureaucratic coup_” led by an unelected billionaire. It’s also a stark contrast to what Musk tweeted on X recently: “We need to shift people from low to negative productivity jobs in government to high productivity jobs in manufacturing.” Hm. **Far from creating a workless utopia, our current technological revolution has created new forms of human exploitation.** Data workers and content moderators — often located in the so-called Global South — provide the hidden human labor that makes “AI” systems function. These workers review disturbing content, label training data and perform the repetitive digital piecework that undergirds our supposedly automated systems. As Karen Hao, author of “Empire of AI,” recently told ESC KEY .CO, we need to resist viewing technologies such as large language models as some disembodied intelligence in a formless “cloud.” Instead, _recognize it as a product with human rights and environmental issues throughout the supply chain_. It’s much the same playbook that Lafargue described in 1883. You might ask, “But what about [...]?!” (Ugh, hello, Steven Pinker.) In as much as, say, post-war economies in the United States and Europe helped lift many out of poverty and improved life spans, much of that was ultimately attained through socialist-lite policies such as the GI Bill. The GI Bill provided universal college education to _white_ U.S. veterans. More so, it was achieved through _relentless_ labor organizing such as the mid-20th century union efforts that led to improved work conditions for, as Bernie Sanders reminded us in the 2016 election, Denmark (true for worker-led movements around the world, too). The protections we enjoy today came through long-term movements, solidarity and collective action. **Technology does not achieve progress for workers. Workers achieve progress for themselves.** Even so, the worst of industrialized exploitation was mostly outsourced and offshored — repeating patterns of colonialism that continue in today’s tech supply chains for everything from cell phones to chatbots. In the context of Big Tech's “AI” hype, the _Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)_ has recognized this reality in 2024 when they unveiled the _Data Workers’ Inquiry project_, which adapts Marx’s 1880 Workers’ Inquiry methodology to understand the experiences of “data workers who are both essential for contemporary AI applications yet precariously employed — if at all — and politically dispersed.” As Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan wrote about the experiences working as a data worker in Nairobi: > “Content moderators risk their lives to train AI machines and algorithms, yet are only compensated with low pay and poor working conditions and are left with mental health issues and addiction problems. ...] [**_These jobs destroy many young lives_****.** ” ## The thing to talk about over your next power lunch: Ultimately, what makes “The Right to Be Lazy” particularly engaging is its biting wit. As Alex Andriesse, associate editor at the New York Review Books, _said in a 2023 interview_ about _his new translation_: > “To me part of the interest of it is that he sounds like he’s constantly joking or being hyperbolic but he’s really barely joking and barely being hyperbolic as he talks about how the capitalists, the owners, the proprietors have sort of taken advantage of this just to line their own pockets without any concern for the people whose lives are being eaten up by these machines.” It explains why the pamphlet has remained a cult classic among critics for generations. Equally, though, it’s easy to poke holes in some of Lafargue’s more utopian impulses. Perhaps _due to what Mark Fisher termed capitalist realism_, it can read like it’s entirely detached from working class reality. It’s also important to acknowledge where Lafargue’s text shows its age. His racist romanticization of so-called “primitive” societies and some other misguided references reflect colonial, European-centric perspectives that we’re still grappling with today. His focus on industrial labor, as well, overlooks domestic work and caring for a family. Reading historical texts requires this context: we can learn from the enduring ideas while drawing a line around the limitations. What happens when we read the text not to “agree” with it but to challenge our own assumptions and expand our own sense of what might be possible? **In that way, it’s not hard to see his writing as a footnote to so much current writing about burnout, overwork, productivity porn, quiet quitting, the pandemic-era Great Resignation, our current recession fears, you name it.** From David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” to Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” today’s critics are updating elements of Lafargue’s central thesis. The four-day workweek trials across the UK and elsewhere, showing maintained or increased productivity with reduced hours, seem to flow from these century-old arguments even if uncredited. **Why haven’t we claimed this “right to be lazy” yet?** To the contrary, many of us have accepted “AI-sterity” as inevitable rather than a choice. (That may be because, as with the case of Shopify workers who are now obliged to use “AI,” it isn’t a choice.) **Too many of us, like the proletariat in Lafargue’s age, have strapped our critical imaginations to these new industrial machines.** What I find so fascinating in rereading “The Right to Be Lazy” isn’t so much the early Marxist theory or the analysis of 19th century labor. Rather, **it’s the provocative prompt for us to ask, what would truly democratizing technology look like in the benefit of society, not shareholders?** Perhaps most crucially, what would happen if we, collectively, started treating time offline not as an indulgence but as central to, you know, being human? Maybe a less click-bait-y title could be “The Right to Live a Chill Life and Hang Out With Family and Friends”?! And yet, how difficult is it to even imagine such a world? **Our culture has so thoroughly internalized “work as virtue” that questioning it feels almost blasphemous.** **The words “lazy” and “idle” are still powerful slurs.** If you’re wondering, wow, this all sounds great, but how do you do it, JD?! I'll confess that while writing this briefing on a public holiday, I checked my time-tracking app and found I’ve averaged 60 or so hours of work weekly over the past year. In other words, intellectually “anti-hustle culture” while practically keeping myself in servitude to the boss girl hustle. As Lafargue puts it, with his characteristic wit: > “O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!” ## And one long thing to read: To make it easy to read, reference and share, we’re republishing the original 1883 translation by Charles Kerr, the pioneering Chicago, Illinois-based publisher who the United States government denied mailing privileges to. The government then alleged books like this one to be seditious violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. Read “The Right to Be Lazy” in full: “The Right to Be Lazy” by Paul Lafargue: Read the 1883 polemic that pierces productivity pornThe inaugural selection in the Public Domain Reading Club: Marx’s son-in-law’s witty pamphlet on the paradox of technological advancement and automation: despite the promises otherwise, it never frees us from work. Presented in the original translation — once deemed too dangerous for U.S. mail.ESC KEY .COPaul Lafargue

****Welcome to the Public Domain Reading Club — selection #1**** Join ESC KEY .CO's readers as we dive into the archives to uncover works that resonate unexpectedly with our current moment. From technological critiques to forgotten radicals, from alternative visions to skeptical inquiry, each selection crosses time to illuminate patterns that persist across different eras of upheaval and transformation. To make it easy to read and reference, we republish these texts in full for subscribers — completely unaltered in their original edits or translations. In doing so, we acknowledge their historical context and limitations while excavating their enduring insights. Some were considered dangerous enough to be censored; others overlooked due to who wrote them. They're contributions to ongoing conversations about work, technology, cooperation, and how we organize society. We recommend starting with the companion briefing, where we contextualize the work, connect dots to current thinking and pose discussion questions. So bookmark this page and join us in reading between the lines of history — and our weird era. ### Upgrade to continue reading Become a paid member to get access to all premium content Upgrade

****Nom nom nom! Welcome to Power Lunch**** , a series of speculative lunches with creative minds navigating achievement and reinvention in our very weird era. Is a Power Lunch a case study? Knowledge exchange? Restaurant rec?! Nothing’s off the table. On Friday, **ESC KEY .CO’s inaugural Power Lunchee** **Tiara Darnell** wandered around a Brazilian city with a few new friends. Thirsty, she paused at a cart in a plaza when she heard it: “Ti... Tia... Blaxicocina!?” She turns to find two women she’d met at her restaurant in Mexico City, right as the couple were about to move somewhere and start their new life together. They were celebrating their anniversary in Brazil when Darnell realized, wow, people are recognizing me thousands of miles away. A week or so ago in Rio de Janeiro, the same thing happened. Former customers who’d come to one of her Free Spaghetti Mondays spotted her at a patio bar. These moments of recognition, far from where she built her dream, remind her that what she created continues to resonate in unexpected ways, even after she’s moved on. Having already lived what many would consider several dream lives, Darnell finds herself at 36 asking: “What are the things you wanted when you were unencumbered and the world hadn't completely jaded you yet? Have you actually accomplished those things, or did they get buried somewhere along the way?” The former Spotify producer left the United States in 2021, settling in Mexico City where she opened Blaxicocina — the city's first Black American soul food restaurant, a venture that connected diasporic culinary histories and quickly gained local acclaim. Earlier this year, she made the difficult decision to close its doors. When we lunch, Darnell is in what she initially described to me as “a place where nobody knows my name” — though that's proven less true than expected. She’s contemplating questions rarely discussed in aspirational entrepreneurial narratives: What happens when you achieve your childhood dreams — and then have to walk away? What comes next? **There’s only one rule to Power Lunch:** we are granted the power to lunch anywhere in the world, but the Power Lunchee must pick only one place where we will virtually gather. This rule is now in effect. 🍴🍴🍴 **You made it! Where in the world are you right now?** I’m in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, about five hours northwest of Rio de Janeiro. This is a highly underrated city — most foreigners thinking about Brazil aren’t thinking about this place. But this is actually the culinary capital of Brazil. They produce about a sixth of the world’s coffee here. The cachaça, that cane sugar spirit similar to rum, is produced here. They have amazing cheese products and a beer scene. I feel like this city is like a mix of Washington, D.C. and Mexico City, but in a Brazilian context, with the food scene of Seattle. And the hills to go with it. You're working those glutes every single time you leave the house. **So basically you’ve earned lunch, working out for it.** Lunch and museum day. There are so many museums here too. ## “What are the things you wanted when the world hadn****’**** t completely jaded you yet?” **I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a nice chatty lunch — the power of Power Lunch is that we can _figuratively_ “go” anywhere! So, where do you want us to go?** I’ve thought hard about this question, and you’re going to laugh when you hear my answer. When I really want to have a conversation with someone, I like to go somewhere where the menu isn’t too fussy. We can decide what we want and focus on the conversation because the food is already taken care of. So, even though I’ve been to 33 countries and eaten some amazing food, I really want to take us both back to Portland, Oregon to Nong’s Khao Man Gai on Southeast Ankeny Street. Because that chicken and rice never misses. That broth just hits your palate and goes down your throat like a hug. **You took a really basic question and gave me a beautiful philosophy on how to choose a lunch spot. As you know well, I used to live near Nong’s in East Portland, and when I was moving out of my apartment before moving to London, in the throes of the worst heartache of my life, I was _hoarding_ Nong’s sauce. My mom flew out to help me pack. One of us dropped a bottle of sauce that splattered all over the floors. And for my last 48 hours in Portland, my apartment just smelled like Nong’s. It was kind of heaven.** That’s one of those smells that lingers for sure. I appreciate Nong’s even more now that I’ve had a restaurant. If I did this all again, I would just focus on one dish. She has perfected this one dish and made it something that’s _craveable_ , that you want to come back for and _unique_ in that you can’t really get it anywhere else. That’s what I have to think about for next time — how do you make something that’s true to who you are but that people crave? That comforts them? With ingredients that keep the margins high? There’s so much alchemy that has to happen to make a restaurant work. Tiara Darnell with the director Boots Riley at her Mexico City restaurant, Blaxicocina, for a screening for the miniseries "I'm a Virgo." **Let’s get our order in. What exactly are you getting?** The piset chicken and rice. All dark meat, extra cilantro, extra sauce. And another order to go, because I’m definitely going to want some more later. Oh and the coconut milk soft-serve with toasted coconut flakes on top. Extra coconut flakes. **I mean, dream lunch. Now that we’ve ordered, what’s going on with you right now? What’s new?** I’ve been in Brazil since January 1st. My birthday was January 3rd — I turned 36 and just wanted to be somewhere completely different. A place where nobody knows my name. I decided on Brazil because it’s always been on my list, and I have this feeling that when you don’t take opportunities while you have them, they take much longer to come around again. ## “I realized how much more relaxed and at ease I felt living outside the U.S.” **On the topic of taking opportunities, in the last four years, you’ve lived out a few dreams that many people spend their lives thinking about but never take the leap on. First, in 2021, you relocated to Mexico as a remote worker. What made you want to leave America then?** I lived abroad for two years in the Peace Corps in Morocco, and I realized how much more relaxed and at ease I felt living outside the U.S. I actually appreciated the U.S. more not being in it. I kind of forgot about that feeling because I came back and got caught up in the rat race — working in wine and cannabis in Oregon, doing two master’s degrees simultaneously, trying to become a journalist and get a job at a place that I ultimately realized didn’t see my value and would never hire me. Then I moved for love to Buffalo. The pandemic happened, and I got hired by Spotify in August 2020. I finally had a salary again but I wasn’t happy in western New York. My relationship was ending in a beautiful way, thankfully, and that’s when I decided to go to Mexico. It was a clandestine move because of Spotify’s policies. You’d think a global music streaming company would be open to employees working where they have offices, but that wasn’t the case. I took a leap of faith and just went anyway, feeling like I wasn’t the only one not where they said they were. Nine months later they laid off me and my entire team, and closed our division. The irony is that I was a way more effective employee because I was so fulfilled in my personal life. I wasn’t living in the monotony of what I was doing before, struggling to pay rent and take care of myself in the expensive U.S., and it brought so much more color and new energy to every other aspect of my life. My dream job ended, but my dream life had really just begun. I decided to stay in Mexico because I was already happy with my life there. "We'll have a round of these, too!" Agua de Jamaica, one drink on the menu at Tiara Darnell's now shuttered restaurant in Mexico City. **You ultimately got residency and then opened a restaurant. What about Mexico City wooed you?** Mexico City wasn’t on a lot of people’s radars before the pandemic. I always thought of Mexico as sort of a party place, but when I got there — to be in a city that big but so green, with so many cool restaurants and museums, friendly people, and the ability to fly to the beach in under two hours. It just had a lot to offer. I felt at home there quickly. My Spanish improved, and it just felt like an easy place to slip into. It’s still North America, and we’re still North American. Mexico just really felt like a place that I could _be_ and be happy. In remembering the restaurant for the success it was, Tiara Darnell texted me a visual narrative that, as in this case, underscores the thoughtful approach she takes to everything. **Now, it sounds like there are so many Americans in Mexico City right now. How has this surging growth of remote workers and “digital nomads” there — dare we say, “overnomadism” — changed the vibe?** The sentiments around gentrification that were there when I arrived have snowballed and have been exacerbated by U.S. politics right now. A friend was telling me that in her neighborhood the vibe has changed. She has noticed that locals don’t speak to her as much on the street or say good morning the same way anymore. That’s sad because that aspect of the community fabric is one of the things I love most about living there. I hope this is just temporary. ¡Te quiero mucho, CDMX! And the vibe within the Black community has changed, too. It used to be so warm and intimate and we were all so glad to have “escaped” and found each other, a family abroad. But like any family, it’s not perfect. There’s this level of privilege that we experience. We’re not immigrants like “my life has been so hard that I will risk everything to come to this country for a better life.” People from Central America, parts of South America, the Caribbean — they’re fleeing real hardships. We just flew here from L.A. or New York and could go back anytime. To be a Black American in Mexico is to breathe new energy into your life. It feels good to be somewhere where your humanity is acknowledged and you can just be at ease and exist, relatively unburdened, in a way that doesn’t really happen in the U.S. But it’s something I feel deeply conflicted about — we’ve built something special over these last few years especially, but like any immigrant community, we’re making our own bubble. Some people try to incorporate locals into their projects and events, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re not even trying to seriously engage with the local culture. You stick to your same foreigner-saturated areas of town, you’re only able to truly engage with people who speak English and you’re creating spaces or experiences that feel imported from the U.S. and contribute to the erasure of culture and way of life many locals are upset about as the inevitable wave of gentrification swallows everything that made so many fall in love with the city in the first place. But then again, it’s other wealthier locals that are enabling this situation because they’re getting paid, they’re benefitting. ## “To be a Black American in Mexico is to breathe new energy into your life.” **I feel like I want to print that out and mail it to every travel editor in New York and London. That fact seems so obvious when you visit a place, but travel media rarely thinks about that privilege.** I would love to write about that — this idea that some Black people have that they can’t be colonizers. We may not be able to actually colonize, but we absolutely can unknowingly and perhaps, unintentionally, behave like our colonizers in spaces where we benefit from some perceived sense of superiority we’ve never really felt back home. It’s been in me to write about that, but I’m not sure if folks are ready for that conversation. Travel might make you feel good; it’s a happy thing. But there are real consequences to this, like what Bad Bunny’s been talking about with Puerto Rico. The vacationers and property hunters are one thing, the people who are coming to live and be in these places indefinitely, taking from the local community instead of taking part in what already exists in a thoughtful and respectful way, they’re leaving a big footprint as well. **That perspective on the “expat” impact is so valuable. Given your awareness of these dynamics, I’m curious about your own journey within this space. Let’s talk about one big dream you achieved. What made you want to open a restaurant?** So, speaking of building things with intention, there’s this history that people don’t talk about — many escaped or formerly enslaved Black Americans didn’t all go north in the U.S. or to Canada. For some in Texas, Louisiana and nearby states, it made more sense to come to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished several decades before the U.S. did it. It’s known as the Southern Underground Railroad and that story is little-known. When I read about this history, I realized connections between Black Americans and Mexican people that goes back generations. The pandemic allowed more of us the opportunity to move abroad, and I was seeing the growth of the Black American community in Mexico City and realized there was no soul food restaurant. Since both of our cultures love to eat, food could be an excellent way to share this story and to begin to build bridges between us with all this modern day migration going on. I wanted to share this food — family recipes and tried-and-true soul food recipes remixed with Mexican street food influences. And welcome and love on people by nourishing them while honoring our shared histories. That’s in the name, Blaxicocina, a mashup of “Black Mexican Cocina” which means “kitchen” in Spanish. JD Shadel, not pictured here, has one big regret in life. Yeah, they never got to eat at Blaxicocina. Damn. **What did you learn in the process?** This idea that entrepreneurship means escaping the nine-to-five is so far from the reality. You’re actually trading your nine-to-five for a twenty-four-seven schedule. The difference between working with creatives versus business people was also a hard lesson I learned repeatedly. Just because you work for yourself as a freelance creative doesn’t mean you know how to run a business with employees, local regulations, quarterly taxes — there’s levels to it. When it comes to working or collaborating with friends, the best advice I can give is just don’t, especially if you truly value the friendship. But, if you do, make a contract. To some, contracts seem like this big, daunting thing that’s unnecessary if you’re working with someone you trust. No, they’re actually one of the most compassionate things you can do if you both really want the thing to work. Resentment is cancerous. Things can still go sideways even with a contract, but it’s less likely because you’ve taken the time to think through the “what ifs.” ## “This idea that entrepreneurship means escaping the 9-to-5 is so far from the reality. It's 24/7.” **When you’re doing something like a restaurant, it really sucks everything out of you. It’s not like you just shut it off. Even when you're away, it’s something you’re always thinking about.** And speaking to two different audiences — English speakers from the U.S. and Mexicans and other Latin American folks. When I started, most of my customers were Black Americans. By the end, it was probably 80/20 — Mexicans and Latin Americans to Americans from the U.S. and I’m so proud of that. As a business owner, you quickly learn that you cannot rely solely on one audience, especially when one is transient. Figuring out how to navigate that occupied a lot of my mental space. As far as non-gringos were concerned, it was one of the highlights of my life to introduce people to something new by connecting it to what was already familiar to them, like talking about grits to folks who are used to nixtamalized corn in the form of tortillas, et cetera. I loved those moments, and the relationships especially through music with vinyl-heads from countries with large Black populations in other parts of the Americas. This is why Blaxicocina was so much more than just a restaurant. But running it was extremely exhausting, especially dealing with crumbling infrastructure and an indifferent landlord. There are so many moving parts and things that need to be managed and without an operationally experienced team, my own shortcomings as someone who had never done something like this before, and zero investors to be able to hire the sage operational help we needed. I just realized after two years of grinding I couldn’t keep doing it all. Burnout was ultimately a big reason for me closing. We're just going to copy-paste the caption from the image above: "JD Shadel, not pictured here, has one big regret in life. Yeah, they never got to eat at Blaxicocina. Damn." **You’ve described this period as achieving a dream and ultimately having to walk away from it. What has that transition been like?** I think about all the dreams I had as a teenager — what are the things you wanted when you were unencumbered and the world hadn't completely jaded you yet? Have you actually accomplished those things, or did they get buried somewhere along the way? I wanted to travel and see the world. I always wanted to be a chef and maybe have my own restaurant. I didn’t pursue it initially because I grew up in D.C. where everyone works for the government. I decided I wanted to be a diplomat. I fell in love with Cuban music when I was 16, which completely changed how I felt about learning Spanish. I fell in love with Latin America and wanted to live anywhere there. I wasn’t a diplomat for the State Department, but through my love of cooking, food and my restaurant, I got to be a chef, open my own spot, and live in one of the most captivating countries in Latin America. Now I’m in Brazil learning Portuguese — another dream I always wanted to pursue — and I can’t help but think about possibilities here given how connected this country is to its African heritage. I’ve checked off the things I wanted for myself as a teenager, and it’s as gratifying as it is scary to be like, “I did that. Now what?” That’s what I’ve been reflecting on as I seek a new purpose. ## “It’s important to recognize it for what it was, not what I wished it could have been.” **You’ve achieved something remarkable with the restaurant, even though you ultimately had to close it. Was there a moment that really captured the emotional reality of that experience for you?** The day I announced the restaurant was closing, Marshawn Lynch, the former NFL player, came in for dinner. That’s huge — having a celebrity take note of your place and then actually show up. Regrettably, I completely bungled his order. We were understaffed that day and he came with a bunch of folks. I took his table’s order myself, then went and cooked all their food. Everything came out as fast as I could do it and I was so proud of myself until I realized that I somehow forgot his wings. When I came out to say hi, they were already leaving. What should have been a huge accomplishment just reflected how tired and exhausted I was after telling everyone the restaurant was closing in two weeks. It was one of those moments where I did my best and it wasn’t enough, and it was super clear it was time to take a long rest. The restaurant was beautiful. I’m proud of what I accomplished. It’s important to recognize it for what it was, not what I wished it could have been. No one would have given me money in the beginning — a Black American woman with no restaurant experience, fluent in Spanish but with no experience in Mexico, wanting to open in one of the biggest food cities in the world? I did it on my own, putting everything I had into it because I believed in it. I don’t regret it. Now all I have is what I got from selling a few refrigerators. I don’t know what comes next — I think I want to go into restaurant consulting and continuing to develop culturally-inspired curated experiences. But I know as far as Blaxicocina, I gave it everything. I’m not sure if Mexico City is still for me or not, and if it isn’t, I might have to start over somewhere else. But that doesn’t scare me. I just want to keep living the Latin American dream life that my 13-year-old self wanted. 🍴🍴🍴 **Dessert is always a good idea, right?** Well, I was gonna get that second order of Nong’s to go, for sure, but not before soft serve! So, I think that’s dessert. Get as many of those coconut flakes as possible.