Notable links: January 2, 2026

Every Friday, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

We're mostly looking ahead this week: human intuition and creativity are predicted to once again become front and center in tech, and Meta looks like it's betting on being the arbiter of what is real. What could go wrong? Also, in completely unrelated news, some thoughts on what happens when news and information organizations capitulate to power.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

The next big thing in 2026 will be...

There’s a lot of interesting food for thought in this roundup of predictions for 2026 from investors, founders, and technology leaders. AI is dominant here — most people predict it will continue to be transformative at all levels of tech, which feels like a safe bet — but there’s another theme that I think is worth drawing out.

ClassDojo CEO Sam Chaudhary suggests:

“The atomic unit of execution inside companies collapses to a one-person squad; a ‘full-stack operator.’ As AI reduces the cost of execution to near zero, the right person can out-build a 50-person org. The bottleneck becomes finding full-stack operators with curiosity, taste, and judgment.”

To emphasize: the important thing in this prediction is finding people who can operate across the stack; their curiosity, taste, and judgment become pivotal.

Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV, suggests:

“The next big thing in 2026 will be a fresh boom of consumer platforms. Boredom with older platforms + curiosity at what new tools can create + continued desire for connection and the new will usher this in. After a long stretch of it being too hard to interrupt incumbents, the cracks are showing and the newer, the weirder the better as we crave new consumer digital experiences and connection.”

And I think most importantly, Homebrew Partner Hunter Walk adds:

“The next big thing in 2026 will be Kindness. Apolitical, nondenominational, online and offline kindness. Mainstream tech population is exhausted by the escalations of the last decade. Begins investing time and energy in more community, civics, and charity. Leaves the most toxic social spaces to trolls and bots.”

In other words, it’s going to be the squishy human stuff that is going to become central to tech. In many ways it really always has — tech has always been a people business at its heart — but putting it at the center of the discourse is a change. And in a world where AI is becoming more and more prevalent, particularly in transforming how code is written and deployed, it makes sense that it would be.

I do want to add a note about “taste”: I’ve always hated that term for cultural judgments. Taste is subjective, not just from person to person but from culture to culture. When we talk about it, and particularly when we evaluate it, I think there’s a real danger that we do so from one (culturally dominant) demographic and context. I’d like to argue that the only sense of taste that really matters is if you make something that resonates for someone else. If we try and make someone’s work fit into a broader, shared “taste” aesthetic, we run the risk of making it bland at best, and whitewashed at worst.

But I’m pro-human. To the extent that these predictions put human experience, communities, and values first and foremost, I’m excited for the future they describe.

2025: The year in LLMs

Simon Willison has become an expert in LLMs, their technical capabilities, and how they’re transforming software development in particular. So his end-of-year roundup is a must-read if you want to understand the space.

For what it’s worth, I agree with him here:

“The most impactful event of 2025 happened in February, with the quiet release of Claude Code.”

It has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away. (This is not to say that there aren’t many issues with AI aside from these things, of course.)

It wouldn’t surprise me to see more artisanal teams, startups, and small businesses spring up to give that second set a home. But I think we’ll also see more startups and projects created by the first set, too.

It really is a different way of writing software:

“Claude Code for web is what I call an asynchronous coding agent—a system you can prompt and forget, and it will work away on the problem and file a Pull Request once it’s done.

[…] I love the asynchronous coding agent category. They’re a great answer to the security challenges of running arbitrary code execution on a personal laptop and it’s really fun being able to fire off multiple tasks at once—often from my phone—and get decent results a few minutes later.”

There’s a lot more here besides. If you want to get up to speed, or see what you missed, it’s a great place to start.

What is Instagram’s Adam Mosseri really saying in his year-end memo?

Om Malik has some smart observations about Instagram’s messaging at the end of a year that was dominated by AI-generated content:

“AI is flooding the system, and feeds are filling with fakes. Visual cues are no longer reliable. Platforms will verify identities, trace media provenance, and rank by credibility and originality, not just engagement.

It starts by verifying who is behind an account, embedding provenance in media, and rewarding trust signals. Over time, Meta may tighten control and aim to be an identity broker for everyone. Instagrams want you to be prepared for this new era of tighter control over identity, authenticity, and content provenance.“

This isn’t just about AI and advisers preferring to be associated with real content: we’re starting to see age verification laws take hold in various jurisdictions, and there are likely more to come. By preparing users for more identity verification and tying it up with a “this way we know who’s real” bow, they’re able to get ahead of these rules. And being the primary identity broker in the social space during this new era will provide some business security.

I don’t think a move to verified identities is good. Real names don’t improve online community health, and attaching identities to the things people post will have a chilling effect on activists and people from vulnerable communities in particular. It’s also not true that social media is bad for younger teenagers, contrary to popular perception of the research. It’s a trend that leads to more surveillance and less open speech. But if it’s going to happen, Meta, I’m sure, will be delighted to turn it into a moat and a profit center if it can.

Watching Bari Weiss Murder Investigative Journalism at CBS

Spencer Ackerman has had a 60 Minutes piece spiked and has withstood White House demands to stop a story. And he has some thoughts about Bari Weiss spiking the 60 Minutes story about CECOT.

“That's where my mind goes when I read about Weiss "delaying" the 60 Minutes CECOT piece. To what it would have meant for The Guardian leadership to cave on the Snowden stories. What it meant for the Times leadership to have self-censored its reporting on NSA bulk surveillance and CIA torture. The lesson to any journalist attempting to reveal the highest-stakes stories is that you must fight your outlet if you're going to do the work your audience needs to understand the situation it's in.”

Ackerman takes great pains to indicate that CBS was never the bastion of independent journalism that commentators with rose-tinted glasses might have suggested: it had a cozy relationship with the CIA and was indisputably an instrument of power. Still, what Bari Weiss is doing with it rises to some other level: a mouthpiece for right-wing talking points.

It’s also worth saying that this matters less and less. Broadcast news has been slowly diminishing for a generation. CBS, in other words, is not where most people are getting their news. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be again, if it transformed itself into an authentic, trustworthy voice that meets audiences where they’re at today. Which is the opposite of that’s happening; and regardless, it doesn’t make what’s happening any less egregious.