I remember being at SXSW in 2009 and it seemed like all anyone could talk about was Twitter. It’s as if it hadn’t been around for a couple of years already. Tom Woodward and I were joking about it, but we were also like where’ve you been? The water is great! Then Twitter hit peak awesome for me during 2011/2012 when ds106 made the web fun again.* Fast forward 5-10 years and we all know what happened to the platform formerly known as Twitter. A simple cautionary tale, one I’m sure we’ll learn from …
Enter 2022/2023, OpenAI hits the scene and we all pretty much spend the next few years losing our shit. Keep in mind I’m not excluding myself from that narrative. I’m not comfortably outside the gates laughing at all the inmates. Believe me, I tried to resist the tractor beam, I stuck my head in the Italian sand for at least a year or two.
When I realized ignoring it was futile. I started using it for hobby projects like creating the media landscape for a season of Madden 2001 to “understand it.” I drew the line at my hosting work. Instead, I started experimenting with AI to re-visit old grad school papers—exploring the extent to which it can clean-up my writing—and inevitably do the heavy lifting for me.
It quickly becomes a slippery slope, much like the Twitter epidemic—but on a whole different scale. Not only am I at risk of abandoning the bava.blog all together, I’m strongly considering bartering my youngest for a lifetime supply of AI credits. That’s one of their lesser known payment plans still in beta.
One of the truly eye-opening anecdotes I heard yesterday at Cloudfest 2026 Gen Xfest 2026 was how Sam Altman came up with the pricing for OpenAI’s monthly plans.† Market research? No. Cost modeling? Nope. Some careful balance of burn rate and revenue? Not even close.
They simply asked their Discord channel how much they would be willing to pay monthly, and the general consensus was $20. And on the 7th day Altman created pricing!
If that’s not bad enough, the various start-ups—as well as current, viable businesses—trying to get in on the big kill taker have decided on pricing, guess how much? $20 per month. If it’s good enough for Uncle Sam, why not any other upstart that wants to be competitive with the biggest venture capital hound in history. What could go wrong? Fake it until you make it? Or at least can’t afford it.
So, the basic idea that pricing is completely detached from costs in the AI market is definitely not a great sign as to the health of this space when it comes to simple economics. It may payoff for companies getting 100s of billions of dollars of runway. The bailout will always be there for the rich, the rest of us will be picking up the bill as the billionaires dine and dash. Feels familiar. 2008 anyone? Any midsize to small host trying to break into this game right now is more likely to experience not a long, slow bleed-out, but a short one.
But who will tell their story?
At Gen Xfest the sense of moving towards an industry apex (at least in terms of financials) was real. More than a few hosts and agencies were there, like me, trying to figure out where things are heading—but you can’t really get that from the presentations cause they’re all sales pitches. You have to read between the lines, trying to measure the level of desperation in the room—how much of this is confidence, and how much is survival.
I remember at one of the later Northern Voices (2011 I believe) the money was drying up and the subsequent breakup of various smaller Web 2.0 companies was already underway. There were questions about what happened to this company or that, and the Flock browser CEO was walking around bombed telling folks the party was over. By that point, trying to read the tea leaves was not necessary, it was depressingly evident.
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*There’s a slogan I could get behind: Make the Web Fun Again
†Apocryphal or not, it works for this post 🙂
I have a strange urge to listen to Fugazi.
I was while writing this post, Discord Records had it right all along. To be clear “merchandise” off Repeater.
I love this post in so many ways! I want to write more, but I’ve got a few things in the crock pot. I do love (and miss) the Bava as well!!!
I’ve always been the caretaker of the bava, Mr Rush.
I don’t buy that the GenAI wave has the same shape and physics of earlier ones. The thing about the early web and pre/corporate Twitter was that we chose order almost invited to explore. It was that description you made of DS106 having “eventness” like it was noisy, weird, active and created a wider sense of “I want to be part of that”.
Nearly everything about the compulsion to go GenAI is almost by force, by threat, and it’s created something far beyond FOMO to the first word being Panic heading into Mass Hysteria.
The fun and neat things one can do with it as you have done feel so tainted by this environment of motivation by fear. And thats what I resent so much.
And if an outcome of your GenXFest are blog posts like these, please attend more industrialized conferences!
Yeah, you’re right, definitely not apples to apples, and the rhetoric of fear around AI, beyond missing out is yet another post to right tonight. But I’ll end on some high notes with Radia Perlman and Brewster Kahl. Back to Twitter though, it might be seen as a micro-instance of AI in some fashion. I resisted heavily at first, but once I was in it was harder to get out, but by the end of that cycle serious harm had been done. What if that AI, but just on crack? Also, there was a certain amount of pressure to try many of those Web 2.0 tools, but in retrospect the stakes seem a lot lower.
Feels good to blog like this, even if it is half-baked. Who am I kidding, it’s always half-baked. But if I learned anything reading and writing go hand-in-hand for me. When I am home I just watch movies. Luckily I have an outlet for that now with the podcast, I do wish I blogged more regularly about the movies.
The old “privatize the profits and socialize the cost” flim-flam https://archive.ph/chefe
I love that term flim-flam, and I know I am three years late, but I am trying to catch up. Italy provides a kind of concrete wall from much of the US bullshit, but AI has proven harder to escape. I’m working on it 🙂