What To Read This Weekend

Okay, this might be the N+1 attempt to rekindle this newsletter format. I start with good intentions, but always fail at maintaining continuity. I am going to give this one more try, and see how it goes. As Yoda said, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” — Om

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If you were to look for a single thread running through everything, we all seem to be asking, who’s really in control? And this shows up, very subtly, in whatever I seem to be reading online these days.

Whether it’s AI flooding music platforms, algorithms using your browsing history to price gouge, or self-built doorbell cameras as a national surveillance network, the theme is the same. Systems built for convenience are the ones that own us. But I have written about that already.

Here are five articles that are worth your time.

• “Suno Hit $300M While Artists Declared War.” How can both these things be possible? I was intrigued enough to read this piece. The piece articulates it better than I could here, but the meta point is that Suno now has 2 million paying subscribers and generates 7 million tracks a day. That’s more new music in two weeks than Spotify’s entire catalog. Meanwhile, a coalition of artist groups launched a “Say No to Suno” campaign. Both sides are right, and both sides are missing the point. The real crisis isn’t creation. It’s that nobody has built a quality layer for any of this. [VoteMyAI]
• “Nobody Trusts Anybody Anymore.” Hanna Horvath makes the case that eroding trust isn’t just a social problem. It’s an economic one. Ghost jobs, surveillance pricing, cancellation flows so Byzantine that Amazon internally named theirs “Iliad.” We’ve built an economy that systematically destroys the conditions for trust, then charges us for the workarounds. This one stuck with me, because I have written about the cost of half-truths and lies before. [Your Brain on Money]
• “With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet.” Remember when Ring was just a doorbell camera? Now it has a feature called “Search Party” that turns every Ring camera in your neighborhood into an AI-powered dragnet, ostensibly to find lost dogs. 404 Media’s Jason Koebler connects the dots from cute Super Bowl ad to what this really is. Consumer-deployed surveillance infrastructure, built on fear and sold as convenience. This is the Third Eye Era I’ve been writing about, except we installed the cameras ourselves. [404 Media]
• “I Guess We’re Doing Moon Factories Now.” Casey Handmer lays out the economics of why SpaceX is pivoting to lunar development, and it’s not about flags and footprints. It’s about AI. The demand for compute is so enormous that building data centers in orbit, powered by solar, and manufacturing satellite components from lunar raw materials might actually pencil out. The economic value of an inference token turns out to be orders of magnitude higher than a byte of your TikTok stream. Wild, rigorous, and worth reading slowly. [Casey Handmer]

From CrazyStupidTech

• “Enveda’s Drugs from Plants Will Turn Pharma Upside Down.” Fred Vogelstein profiles Enveda, a five-year-old biotech company that uses mass spectrometry, AI, and robotics to find drug candidates in plants, at a tenth of the cost and four times the speed of traditional pharma. They already have four drugs in clinical trials with only 200 people on staff. The founder’s insight is that nature has spent billions of years pre-optimizing molecules for biological compatibility. The AI just helps find the right ones. (Disclosure: Enveda is backed by True Ventures, where I am a partner emeritus. I have no direct or indirect involvement with the company.) [Crazy Stupid Tech]

Shoutout

Good friend Pete Warden for launching a private speech transcription app for Mac, Moonshine. I have already downloaded it.

Plus, things I wrote this week, ICYMI:

• OpenAI and the Announcement Economy
• Living in the Petri Dish of the Future
• Mad Money: The Big AI Race
• Conveniencing Ourselves to Irrelevance
• How AI Goes to Work

March 1, 2026. San Francisco