They Insulated Themselves and Reached Into Your Life

This week's theme is touch.

It is hard lately to grasp anything in tech. Hard to get your hands around it. Hard to reach out and touch the things you are working with, the people making the decisions about your job, the systems shaping your week. A film is developing over the world that prevents you from touching it directly.

The theme this week is touch. Who gets to touch what, who is allowed to touch whom, and which direction the touch flows. Once you see the asymmetry, you cannot unsee it.

I Used to Touch the Code

When I learned to code, I learned in Neovim. Keyboard-driven text editor. No mouse. Brutal learning curve. But once you have your hands around it, you can fly. Hands never leave the keyboard. Fingers stay close to the home row. Exquisitely well-designed software, of the kind we are going to see less and less of as AI gains eminence.

The thing I really liked about Neovim is that you could reach out and touch the code. Any engineer comfortable in their workflow will tell you the same thing. After a while, you develop an almost physical sense of the codebase. You can feel where you are in it. You can feel when something is wrong before you can articulate what.

I know how weird that sounds. Anybody who has driven a manual long enough develops the same gut feeling about the engine. Whether it is healthy. Where it is responsive in the power band. You probably have a version of this in your own life. Maybe you bake. Maybe you garden. Mastery turns into a physical sense, even when the thing is intellectual.

Now, with AI, if I say "make that button blue," the model coitates, marinates, discombobulates, recombobulates, synthesizes, and produces a button. The button is the blue of the sky above me right now, not the dark blue I wanted. So I say "make it dark blue." Coitates. Synthesizes. Returns the correct blue. Two turns. Would have taken me a moment in Neovim.

That is not an argument for speed. That is an argument for the loss of touch. There is now a film over the code. A thin layer between me and the medium I am supposed to own, mediated by a service I do not control and the inner workings of which Anthropic and OpenAI do not open source. I have been removed one step from the codebase. So how will I know if something is wrong in there? How will I know without the gut sense? The sense of touch, which is a form of power, is gone.

The Untouchables

The new untouchables are the ultra wealthy. The Epstein class. Not the caste-system version of the word. The inversion of it, because everything is upside down in this modern era.

A few weeks ago, a man visited Sam Altman's house in Russian Hill and threw Molotov cocktails at it. If you look at a photo of where it happened, you can see the burn marks somebody tried to clean up, twenty to thirty security cameras on every corner, and the closest a member of the public can physically get to the building is quite far from the building itself. You are not allowed to touch Sam Altman. Not unless you are also in the Epstein class, in which case the rules are different.

Dario Amodei is untouchable too. Physically untouchable in the same way. But also, and this is the interesting part, mentally untouchable. We do not know if he is married. We do not know if he has kids. Basic biographical detail about somebody who is giga-wealthy and constantly in the spotlight. The kind of thing that just comes up. We do not have it. No idea. No idea. Nobody can tell you.

Meanwhile, you are touched inappropriately by the tech companies. They touch all of your data. They touch all of your information. We cannot look at Dario Amodei's chat logs with his own LLM. He and everyone at Anthropic can look at ours, and train models on the private and privileged things we have unwisely typed in. The asymmetry is total.

The Apple Experiment

About five miles from where I am sitting, Apple has a data center. I plan to drive over there in a couple of weeks, before it gets too hot here east of Phoenix.

This video is going to end up in my iCloud storage. iCloud is not in the clouds. It is at a data center. It lives on a hard drive, just not my hard drive. So I am going to walk up to the door and say, "I shot a video and I would like to see my data. I would like to touch my data." Seeing is a form of touch. We are touching the photons reflected off the thing we are seeing.

How fast do you think they will call the local police and have me removed as some kind of nut job who has watched the Terminator too many times? I do not think we will get inside the facility. We will record it from the sidewalk. A security guard, who paradoxically is in the same wild class as me, will come out and harass me for recording on public property. It will be a good one.

But the answer is the point. My data is untouchable. Not apportioned to me by the Epstein class. Only the Epstein class can touch unlimited data. Yours is ephemeral to you, and not to anybody else.

What You Can Still Touch

Do not despair. There are still a lot of things you can touch.

You can touch the people around you. You can touch them with ideas, even when the touch is mediated by a harmful algorithm that is suppressing content that talks about exactly these things. You can touch your local community. You can touch your family. You can be a person who influences the world in a healthy way. In a healthy way.

A few years ago, my wife and I were trying to get back to church. We had started attending a local Orthodox parish. Our daughter was about a year and a half old, and she was fussy. Loud. She has not stopped being loud. She is almost four now and being loud is my favorite thing about her. But at a year and a half, in a quiet church, you have to step out a lot.

I remember being tired. She was fussing through the entire liturgy and I was in and out the whole service. Right before communion, an older gentleman, who is now my wife's godfather, walked over to me. He put his hand on my back for a moment and said, "You're doing good, Dad. You're doing good."

I still remember that. Two and a half years later, I still remember it. I still feel happy when I think about it. I barely knew the guy. He just came up and said it, and it transformed my week.

That is the kind of touch the Epstein class will never be able to revoke. They have insulated themselves from your reach. They have not figured out how to insulate the people around you from the reach of your hand on their back.

The sun is going down here, and it looks like there are some storm clouds gathering. Looks like it is going to rain.