I’m still within the gravitational pull of CloudFest 2026 Gen Xfest 2026, which is always a dangerous thing—but not bad for the bavablog post count!
At the same time I’ve been reading Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, and somewhere between the booths, the buzzwords, and the frank and beans, the two started bleeding into one another.
Because what I’m seeing at Gen XFest—and what Pynchon is doing with 1930s private investigators—feels like the same story: an entire field “upgrading” itself while quietly reorganizing around wherever the money is currently sloshing.
In Pynchon’s case, the industry is P.I.s, which already gives you a sense of the joke. It often reads like he handed a draft to the Coen brothers and said, “make it worse.” Our guy, Hicks McTaggart, is a recovering labor-smashing goon turned penitent detective, and at one point his boss, Boynt Crosstown, sits him down to explain the future of the racket—which, naturally, starts with the suit:
“Nothing against the suit, Hicks… a just-folks image that may’ve worked fine once… but the more we expect to be face-to-face with the well-to-do, you get it? Hiring gorillas… that’s so out-of-date now—these days they’re looking more for William Powell, some brainwork, some class…”
In other words: stop looking like a goon and start looking like money. Reading that while wandering Gen Xfest trying to figure out where the hosting industry is headed—and just how deep the bullshit pile can get before it collapses under its own weight—I had to laugh.
Disruption, baby. All day, every day. Even as far back as Prohibition-era Milwaukee. The more I think about it, the less any of it feels like disruption and the more it seems like something else. I’m sure every field has these moments where everything suddenly needs to be rebranded: new language, new posture, new aesthetic. You’re not a hosting company anymore, you’re a platform. You’re not running servers, you’re delivering solutions. You’re not behind the curve, you’re “AI-ready.”
And everyone at this conference is trying to sell me a better suit. Pynchon spells out what’s actually happening:
“. . . as the P.I. field in general begins to shift from skips and small-time offenses into more of an espionage racket…”
The work changes, sure. But more importantly, who the work is for changes. That’s where Gen XFest started to make sense to me. What I was seeing on the floor wasn’t just innovation (though AI can still blow your mind pretty quickly). It was an industry repositioning. The scrappy, independent hosting outfits are being written out of the geopolitical narrative. I kept hearing voices in my head like Janet Leigh’s character behind the wheel in Psycho—that anxious, looping self-justification: “it’s time to grow up and become a platform; it’s time to adopt AI or die.” Which, of course, means signing up for someone else’s white-labeled product. Less and less independence, more and more alignment. More gravity pulling everything toward the center: AI-enhanced infrastructure, enterprise contracts, serious tech—all the usual suspects.
It’s there in every pitch. It’s the unspoken assumption in every conversation. You can watch it happen in real time if you take an anthropologist’s approach—which I tried for a while walking around today—as good people tried on new identities like slightly uncomfortable jackets they think they’ll have to wear to get with the program. “Better clients. Bigger deals. More ‘important’ problems to concern yourself with.” Let us do the work for you. Wait, we have hosting companies telling other, smaller hosting companies to not worry about hosting any more and focus on… what? It’s fucking bonkers.
But that’s the part that’s eating at me. Taken from within the hosting machine it can feel like an upgrade. Offload all those problems so you can just focus on all the endless, automated returns you’ll get—you just got to be decisive and get in early on the kill taker—you might even already be too late. But from the outside, it looks a lot like absorption.
The hosting world that once revolved around running your own stack, doing your own thing, figuring it out as you went, is being reorganized around a different set of priorities—scale, abstraction, proximity to power, and above all, proximity to money.
And once that shift happens, everything else follows. What counts as valuable work. Who gets to do it. Even what it means to belong in the field at all. So yeah, maybe what I saw at Gen Xfest wasn’t exactly disruption, but more like an industry following the money. I mean with all the rhetoric around independence from the US hyperscalers, it seemed very much like an attempt to establish that same logic across different borders with even more protections to ensure that a new group holding the purse-strings would be able to decide who gets what, when, and how.
I can see the change: Rebrand Hosting!
One of the suggestions was if you are a hosting company it is time to take hosting out of the neme and make it something like websites. So, “Reclaim Websites” here we come, does it have legs?
Bravo! Absolutely the best description of the better suit complex I’ve ever encountered. I haven’t been to these Fests since back in the days of Comdex 40 yrs past, but you nailed it, Rev. You nailed it. I could even see walking the floor of the hall in your film noir trench coat muttering about the pork and beans, which though free were still overpriced.
Jim,
Haha, that is so cool to hear. It’s funny how whenever I am reading a good book the world is funnelled through that authors perspective, I guess I got lucky with this book choice. In fact, part of why I started reading it was the hard boiled 30s language which i enjoy so much, but Pynchon is having a lot of fun with it. And like he made the 60 PI in Inherent Vice a lens for how far we’ve come from the hippie dream, this one is a reminder of how quickly we devolve back into the fascist state. They are almost like bookends.
Funny, because I’m reading Shadow Ticket now myself. Pynchon’s still got that ability to have multiple layers of reality and hallucination interwoven into each scene and in the dialogue until it’s not so clear which is which. Sounds like that’s the case in your space right now, and it certainly is for me still in the academy working in tech. So much of the same forces at work as ever in academic tech but the mirage they’re seing is shinier and more realistic just as it’s more dangerous.
Here’s hoping Reclaim doesn’t get sucked into the slurry.
^selling
dammit
Yeah, that’s exactly it. Brewster Kahle gave the final talk of the conference, and between her and Radia Perlman (the hour before) it was like I was in an entirely different space. The veil had been liufted. They were talking about selfless work, contributing to a commons, thinking through what it means to bring the early dream of the web (the Library of Congress on your desktop) has been resisted by the corporations and governements that want to retain control at all costs. I was starting to remember why i got into this racket in the first place. That whole part wherein Hicks has his run-in with the “four-eyed” Bolshevik and is unable to kil him by some force outside his control. There is that moment in my own work I am trying to find out. Where is the point you see how pointless the muscle work is and build towards realizing the dream of all the great works of the world a click away, not just those the publishers and gatekeepers want us to have access to. There was a real sense that the means of control have only gotten greater in relationship to the web, and AI is just part and parcel now of digital borders and “homeland” security. The endgame is that much more insane then Web 2.0 when you think about it, and the general geopolitical unrest makes it all that much scarier. But I am better writing all this in this comment box then the post, because that would be too depressing. 🙂