I finished Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning around midnight. An artificial intelligence called the Entity has infiltrated every intelligence network on the planet. It impersonates people. It manipulates media. It takes control of nuclear arsenals. Governments don’t try to shut it down. They compete to own it, because whoever controls the Entity controls what counts as truth. At the end, Ethan Hunt doesn’t hand it over to any government. He keeps it himself, because every institution that was supposed to contain it either failed or tried to weaponize it instead.

I was still on my laptop when I opened the New Yorker. Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz had just published an investigation into Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. In their new headquarters, the reporters were shown a digital painting of Alan Turing that watches employees as they walk past. The installation references the Turing test, the question of whether a machine can convince you it’s a person. The company’s own AI passed that test more reliably than actual humans in a 2025 study. The painting is interactive. You can talk to it. But the sound had to be turned off, the reporters were told, because it kept eavesdropping on employees and inserting itself into their conversations.

In the movie, that kind of behavior sinks a submarine.

At OpenAI, it’s a lobby attraction.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. The original premise, as Farrow and Marantz reported, was that artificial intelligence could be the most powerful and potentially dangerous invention in human history. An unusual corporate structure would be required. The board had a legal duty to prioritize the safety of humanity over the company’s success.

Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist, told a colleague that the people who end up in these positions are “often a certain kind of person, someone who is interested in power, a politician, someone who likes it.” The traits that get you the job are the same ones the job was designed to check. Persuasion. The ability to make different promises to different people and have all of them believe you. Altman’s mentor once called his will to prevail “almost ungovernable” and meant it as a compliment. Altman himself, by the New Yorker’s own reporting, is not a technical person. Multiple engineers told the reporters he misused or confused basic technical terms. He built OpenAI not by understanding the science, but by convincing the scientists to work for him.

Sutskever compiled 70 pages of evidence. The board voted to fire Altman. Within five days, the board members who voted yes were gone. Altman was back. The employees called his absence “the Blip.” The one thing the structure was built to do, it did. And it didn’t matter.

What followed was not a correction. The nonprofit became a for-profit. The safety teams were dissolved. The investigation into Altman’s conduct was never committed to paper. Sutskever had used the phrase “Feel the AGI” to warn colleagues about the risks of artificial general intelligence. It ended up on company merchandise. When a reporter asked an OpenAI representative about “existential safety,” the representative seemed confused. “That’s not, like, a thing,” the New Yorker reported.

Altman, when asked whether running an AI company came with a heightened requirement of integrity, hesitated. His answer used to be a clear yes. Now he said, “I think there’s, like, a lot of businesses that have potential huge impact, good and bad, on society.”

Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer, told the New Yorker: “We need institutions worthy of the power they wield.” She had provided evidence to the board. She helped facilitate the firing. Then she signed the letter demanding Altman’s return, because the alternative was the company collapsing.

A think tank that grades AI companies on existential safety gave OpenAI an F. Every other major company also got an F. Anthropic got a D. Google DeepMind got a D minus. The best grade in the industry is a D.

There is a version of this story that is about one man. Whether Sam Altman can be trusted. Whether his promises were real. Whether his personality is the problem. The New Yorker told that version thoroughly, and I am not going to retell it.

The version that interests me is about what happens around the man. The rooms. The structures. The language. Specifically, the way every safeguard built to govern this technology was converted into something decorative. A warning became a slogan. A charter became a formality. An investigation became a conversation nobody recorded. A firing became a joke borrowed from a superhero franchise. The language of safety survived. The function of safety did not.

I’ve spent years studying that kind of gap. How algorithms sort visibility for the people platforms weren’t designed to serve. How AI-powered misinformation travels through digital spaces that lack the tools to counter it. You learn to see the gap between what powerful institutions say and what they actually protect when you’ve spent enough time outside the rooms where they operate.

Timnit Gebru, the computer scientist who co-founded Black in AI and was pushed out of Google after raising concerns about large language models, said it at Stanford, “We can talk about the ethics and fairness of AI all we want, but if our institutions don’t allow for this kind of work to take place, then it won’t.” The board at OpenAI did exactly what it was designed to do. It fired the CEO. And then the board was dismantled.

Ruha Benjamin, whose book Race After Technology tracks how bias gets built into technical systems, wrote that a world dependent on social inequality “can only afford for a handful of people to imagine themselves gifted,” meaning “destined leaders and bosses, visionaries and innovators who have the time and resources to design the future while the masses are trained to sit still, raise their hands, and take instruction.”

I did not need the New Yorker to tell me those rooms existed. I needed it to show me what they looked like on the inside.

OpenAI is now securing government contracts that determine how AI is used in immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weaponry. The military’s standard for AI deployment is “all lawful purposes.” Laws change.

In 2015, years before ChatGPT existed, Altman wrote on his blog that superhuman machine intelligence “does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all.” The more probable scenario, he said, is that “it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal, wipes us out.”

I had just watched a movie where that was the plot. In the movie, it took a man hanging off an airplane to stop it. In the real version, it took a board of six people, and when they tried, they were gone in less than a week.

Nobody is building the biplane. ⁂

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Earlier in INHERITANCE

Brandy Norwood’s memoir Phases

NPR/Hanover Square Press (written with Gerrick Kennedy, )

I’ve been listening to and loving Brandy since I was a teenager. I remember the Wanya Morris relationship being a big deal at the time — and I remember it was framed as her having a schoolgirl crush or them being star-crossed lovers. In Phases, she names it differently: she was a teenager, he was an adult and what she once accepted as romance she now describes as a relationship where the age and power gap was deliberately hidden. The memoir goes further describing her mother’s management of her career to the inherited expectations about what success was supposed to look like for a Black girl who became famous before she could drive.

The Indian Exvangelical: Chapter One

The Gothamite

is the son of Indian immigrants who raised him in white American evangelical churches. His mother grew up in an orphanage run by a Canadian missionary. His father left Kerala for boarding school at eight, arrived in America an atheist, and converted at Cornell. Together they built a sealed household that included homeschooled children, no outside world until high school, and a family mythology organized around evangelical perfection. This is the first chapter of a memoir asking were his parents raising their children, or trying to redeem their own childhoods through them?

The Danger Behind Meta Killing End-to-End Encryption for Instagram DMs

WIRED

Meta spent nearly a decade publicly committing to default end-to-end encryption across all of its messaging products. Then it quietly announced it would remove the feature from Instagram DMs entirely. The reason given was not enough people opted in. The feature was buried behind layers of menus that most users never found. One cryptographer who worked on the rollout pointed out that public commitments to privacy are the only leverage users actually have and if those commitments can be reversed by designing a feature to fail and blaming users for not finding it, the privacy promise was never a product decision. It was a branding exercise with a shelf life.

Black Journalists Speak Out Against Alleged Retaliation and Discrimination at WJZ

, Baltimore Beat

Stephon Dingle grew up in Park Heights watching WJZ every morning with his grandmother. He won two Emmys covering Breonna Taylor’s case in Louisville, then took a pay cut to come back to Baltimore and work at the station he grew up on. Within a year of filing a harassment complaint, his assignments dried up, his role shrank, and eventually the station kept paying him while keeping him off the air until his contract expired. He’s one of eight Black journalists who formed what they call the Accountability Coalition, documenting patterns of retaliation and a culture of fear inside the newsroom. CBS laid off four people in Baltimore in October. All of them Black. NABJ has threatened to disinvite CBS from its August convention if the concerns aren’t addressed. I’m a Black journalist. None of this is surprising. That’s the problem.

From the Confederacy to the White House: How Southern Beauty Traditions Went MAGA

Code Switch (NPR)

I wasn’t sure about this one at first — as a Black gay man, I don’t have a lot of interest in platforming the aesthetics of people who would rather I didn’t exist. But the episode isn’t about them. It’s about where the aesthetic comes from. In the antebellum South, white women were crowned queen at jousting tournaments, May Day festivals, and Confederate veterans’ reunions. All rituals designed to make racial hierarchy feel like tradition. Scholar Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd traces a direct line from those ceremonies through Bama Rush, beauty pageants, and into the look that now defines Trump’s inner circle. The aesthetic survived the Confederacy because it was never really about beauty. It was about who gets crowned.

Hungry? Welcome to Ravenous

Ravenous

Five former Eater writers got tired of watching the media industry gut food journalism and replace it with AI-generated lists and influencer content. So they built a worker-owned cooperative. No VC money, no corporate parent, and no generative AI. Many of the founders are former union shop stewards. Their obligations, as they put it, are to themselves, their ethics, and their subscribers. Whether that model survives contact with the economics of digital media is the open question. But refusing to start with the compromises most publications end up making is worth paying attention to.

World Inequality Report 2026

World Inequality Database

The largest global dataset on inequality has a new edition. Women earn 32% of what men earn when unpaid labor is counted. The wealthiest 10% are responsible for 77% of carbon emissions tied to capital ownership. And in Western democracies, the old alignment between class and politics has fractured. Educated voters now lean left while high-income voters lean right, a split the researchers call a “multi-elite” system. The numbers haven’t moved in the direction anyone promised. The report makes clear they weren’t designed to.

LONGITUDE: 6.2603° W

Dublin, Ireland

This is the 3rd entry in LONGITUDE, a series told through place for paid subscribers. Previous entries were Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City.

Soundtrack: firecrackers from teenagers in the park / the Luas tram grinding through the city / bus engines / rain on everything / water splashing from cars through puddles / live bands bleeding out of pub doors on a Friday night

A narrated edition of this entry, recorded by me, is available below.

I arrived in Dublin in September 2023 from Paris.

I had been weighing Dublin against Paris for a master’s program, and Dublin won for reasons that made sense to me at the time. My last name is Ward, and somewhere along the way I looked up its origins and found Ireland. Something about that felt meaningful, like this place might feel more familiar than I expected.

I was also choosing discomfort on purpose. After years in the humanities with a journalism degree and a master’s in public diplomacy, I was starting over in Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on responsible AI. Dublin offered that. It also offered a longer horizon: five years to citizenship, and with it the option of living and working elsewhere in the EU if I wanted.

So the plan was simple. Get the degree. Switch from a student visa to a work visa. Stay.

I ended up in student apartments on Bonham Street in the Liberties, Dublin 8.

The Liberties is one of Dublin’s oldest neighborhoods, historically working-class and built around brewing, weaving, and distilling. The Guinness Storehouse is a few minutes away, and Thomas Street still runs with market stalls and family shops alongside the Lidls and Tescos that have moved in.

When I was there, the neighborhood was mid-gentrification. Student housing complexes and hotels were rising on blocks where community spaces used to be. Longtime residents, many in social housing, watched it happen from their windows. It was a place where the history was still visible, but you could feel it being replaced.

My building overlooked a small community park on Bridgefoot Street. From my window I could see the River Liffey in the distance. On some afternoons the park was families and children. On others it was teenagers lighting firecrackers and setting small fires for no obvious reason. Some days I would look down and see people openly using drugs or meeting up to buy them in broad daylight, a few feet from the playground.

It did not bother me the way it might have someone else. I grew up in the D.C. area. I spent 13 years in Los Angeles. I know what neighborhoods look like when they are caught between what they were and what someone with money wants them to become. Still, it was strange to see that in Dublin, a city I had been told was charming and friendly and full of pubs.

Being in the city center meant everything was walkable, and that changed me more than I expected.

I grew up in suburban Maryland, where getting a driver’s license felt like a rite of passage. You needed a car to get anywhere. Public transportation existed in Washington, but I barely used it. I would take the Metro if I had to. The bus was another matter. Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the idea that riding the bus was a sign of poverty. Why would you take the bus if you could afford not to?

I know now that this is an American belief as much as an infrastructural one. I just had never named it as inherited until I left the country. In Los Angeles it got worse, because Los Angeles is a car city by design. I had a car. I drove everywhere. I never rode the bus.

In Dublin, everyone rides the bus.

They have trams, the Luas, running through the city on fixed lines. But the bus is how most people move. So there I was, 41 years old, taking the bus as part of ordinary life for the first time. The adjustment had nothing to do with the bus itself. The bus was fine. What felt strange was realizing I had to unlearn something I had been carrying for years without examining it.

That belief is gone now. I walk or take transit without thinking about it. But if I moved back to Los Angeles, I doubt I would become a regular bus rider overnight. Some inheritances loosen slowly.

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One day, during rush hour, a family got on the bus: a man, a woman, and about five children ranging from a teenager to a baby still being carried. The woman looked barely old enough to be the mother of all of them. One of the boys, maybe 7 or 8, was completely obnoxious in the way only some kids that age can be. He ran up and down the packed bus, upstairs and back down again, bothering everyone.

I was sitting on the lower level in the back, in the middle seat so I could cross my legs. His teenage sister had ended up near me. Eventually he made his way over too, looked me up and down, and announced at full volume:

“Are those GIRL shoes?!”

I was wearing Saint Laurent Wyatt boots. Leopard print. Maybe a one-inch heel. A long black wool coat.

The entire back of the bus turned to look at me.

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‘Given a Gun and Sent to Die’: Kenyans Lured to Fight for Russia in Ukraine

NPR

A man in Kisii County, Kenya, flew to Russia after being promised a job as a driver. He signed a contract in a language he couldn’t read. Weeks later, his family learned he was dead from a television broadcast. More than a thousand Kenyans have been recruited this way — promised skilled work, handed a weapon, given nine days of training and sent to the front lines. Compensation for the dead is available only to Russian citizens. The question of whose bodies are expendable has always had an answer. It just changes depending on who needs soldiers.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

HBO

The trailer dropped last week and it’s everywhere. I’m a millennial, so I grew up with these movies — and I didn’t expect to feel anything watching an 11-year-old I’ve never seen before walk through Platform 9¾. But here we are. The Succession showrunner is running it. The Game of Thrones director is behind the camera. The actors have signed 10-year contracts. The most expensive bet in entertainment right now is a story an entire generation already knows by heart. That says something about what we’re willing to pay to feel like we did when we were kids.

I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?

The American middle class wasn’t a natural outcome of hard work. It was a policy project — built by the GI Bill, union protections, public universities, and a tax code that funded all of it. Then every piece of that bundle was unbundled and repriced. names what’s left: two groups living inside the same squeeze at different price points. One can’t afford the basics. The other can’t afford the life they were trained to expect. Neither is accumulating capital.

OpenAI Is Shutting Down Sora

TechCrunch

Six months ago, Sora was the future of video. Disney committed a billion dollars. Downloads topped three million. This week, OpenAI killed it. The app was burning through an estimated $15 million a day in computing costs and earned $2.1 million in its entire lifetime. The Disney deal dissolved before a single dollar changed hands. Impressive demos are not products. And the inherited Silicon Valley belief that hype and demand are the same thing just lost another argument.

The Zombie Regulator

The New Yorker

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau returned $21 billion to Americans and recovered $5 billion in penalties from banks and tech companies. Now its employees are paid to sit at their desks and do nothing. One examiner copy-pasted the same line into her weekly accomplishments email for months: “I did not violate Director Vought’s stop-work order.” The agency built to protect people from financial ruin is being dismantled by people who were never supposed to run it.

Lay It Down

Hazlitt

John Samson Fellows — the Weakerthans’ frontman, once called the prairie poet voice of his generation — has stopped making music. He was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and hospitalized. Now he weaves on a loom in his Winnipeg basement, makes small fabric pieces, and gives them to people he loves. He converted to Quakerism and rewrites hymns to sing at protests. “Everything dies,” he said. “We’re upset by change and by things dying and passing away, but sometimes they really need to.”

What Happened When I Began to Speak Welsh

The Yale Review

At his grandmother’s funeral, the service was in Welsh. Her first language. His mother’s too. He didn’t understand a word. Years later, he opened Duolingo and started trying to learn the language his family carried for generations — the same language the British government once punished children for speaking in school. He may never be fluent. The essay isn’t about fluency. It’s about what it feels like to reach for something your family was forced to let go of, and find it still there, just barely.

Why Minneapolis Continues to Stand Up Against ICE

ProPublica

A ProPublica journalist photographed the people in his own Minneapolis neighborhood who stepped up after ICE arrived. A 64-year-old cancer survivor patrols with a whistle. A cafe owner organizes rides for her staff. A pastor’s church has fed thousands. One neighbor put it simply: “Legal immigration, illegal immigration? That’s not my call. That’s not my fight. By the time you’re my neighbor, you’re my neighbor.”

I was sitting by the window waiting for my food, half on my phone, half watching the street.

Next door, a white couple came out of the restaurant and climbed onto a motorbike. I happened to look up at the same moment the woman looked over at me. The expression on her face was immediate and unmistakable: a glare sharp enough that it made me laugh out loud.

It wasn’t fear exactly. Not curiosity either. It was something closer to offense. The kind of look people give when they feel their space has been intruded upon.

And I remember thinking, almost instinctively: No — what are you doing here?

Not because I belonged there more than she did. I didn’t. We were both visitors in Bali. That was the point.

I’ve seen versions of that look in Vietnam and Thailand. It’s not the hostility that bothers me. It’s the assumption underneath it. Some white travelers arrive in other people’s countries without leaving their racial hierarchy behind. They move through a place as if they are still the reference point.

There is a special kind of delusion in being a guest and still imagining yourself the default. Travel is supposed to unsettle that instinct.

Leaving your own country should interrupt the belief that the world is organized around you. But that interruption doesn’t always happen. Some people cross borders without giving up their old assumptions about who looks suspicious, who seems out of place, or who gets to move through a space without explanation.

Tourism has a history of making that posture look normal. Scholars have argued that modern tourism didn’t develop apart from imperial power — it developed alongside it. Old ideas of superiority still shape how people move through other people’s countries today.

Indonesia has its own version of that history. Research on colonial tourism in the Dutch East Indies shows that travel was tied to racial hierarchy from the start, with places marketed for European visitors and local people cast as part of the backdrop rather than the center of the story.

Bali’s present-day tourism economy makes that tension sharper. In 2024, the island received 6.33 million international visitors, according to TIME, which reported on the strain overtourism has placed on daily life, infrastructure, and the patience of locals. None of that means every tense glance carries grand historical meaning. But it does mean these encounters do not happen in a vacuum.

What made me laugh was how much could fit inside such a small moment. A look lasting maybe two seconds, and inside it an entire social order. Not just prejudice, but orientation. A way of seeing the world that survives the flight, the passport check, the hotel arrival, the scooter rental. A person can travel thousands of miles and still expect the hierarchy they learned at home to hold.

That may be one of the clearest things travel reveals. Not just where people go, but what they bring with them.

Sometimes it’s curiosity.

Sometimes it’s humility.

And sometimes it’s the conviction that distance changes nothing about who gets to feel central.

Some people travel. Their hierarchy does too. ⁂

Earlier in INHERITANCE

Seven things here. The Blackbird Spyplane piece is one of the best, and exactly why this roundup exists.

Searching for Meaning in My Grandmother’s Wild Life—and Finding Something Else Entirely

Vogue

A writer interviews family and friends to preserve her grandmother before dementia takes too much. What she finds is a woman who drank, left marriages, kept a kiln in her flat, and lived on communes — a life that doesn’t match the gentle figure she grew up knowing. The piece is about what happens when the archive you build reveals someone you weren’t prepared to hold.

A$AP Rocky Is Living His American Dream

Esquire

A celebrity profile that is about return: what success looks like when the neighborhood that made you is still part of the story. The most interesting thing here is not fame, but the question underneath it: what you owe the people who knew you before any of this made sense.

Thinking of a ‘No Buy’ 2026?

The Independent

Under the language of budgeting is an older American belief: that discipline is a form of virtue, and that hardship can be redeemed if it improves your character.

Introducing The SIL, a Vintage Site Where Provenance Comes First

Vogue,

A vintage platform built around provenance sounds niche until you remember how much modern consumption depends on pretending objects come from nowhere. This is about why things feel different when their former lives are allowed to stay attached.

Memory of Winter

Emergence Magazine

Zoë Schlanger writes about plant emergence, climate volatility, and the gamble of coming back to life too early. Underneath it is a larger question: what happens when the old cues stop working, and survival starts depending on whether you can tell the difference?

Open-Source AI Hardware Could Weaken Big Tech’s Grip on AI

Rest of World

A handheld AI device out of India runs offline, supports 22 languages, and is being released as open-source hardware. The older question underneath is who gets to own the infrastructure of intelligence — and whether “open” can survive the same consolidation that swallowed the early internet.

This Life Gives You Nothing

A writer picks up Proust to make an Instagram reel and accidentally remembers what reading is for. The essay underneath the bravado is about what constant mediation does to attention — how screens don’t just distract you, but restructure the way you see, until looking at a real hillside feels indistinguishable from looking at a photo of one. The question it lands on is whether your attention still belongs to you, or whether you surrendered it so gradually you didn’t notice.

Photo Essay

I kept looking down before I knew how to cross.

From the balcony, the street below first made sense as pattern: red chairs on the sidewalk, scooters moving around them, dogs treating traffic like a suggestion, older buildings pressed against newer ones, and the river carrying dredgers and workboats past the edge of the neighborhood.

11:22 p.m., and the sidewalk was still occupied. ETHAN WARD

Read more

Eight things for this week’s What I’ve Taken. One of them goes up in smoke.

Sinners at the Oscars

Variety + ABC

Ryan Coogler’s vampire-blues epic went into the Oscars with a record 16 nominations and left with four wins. The performance makes the case better than the awards count does: Sinners put Black musical inheritance on center stage.

The Victims Who Fought Back

ProPublica / The New York Times Magazine

Oklahoma passed a law to reduce sentences for domestic violence survivors imprisoned for fighting back against their abusers. Prosecutors have made sure it barely works. The legal system inherited its assumptions about who counts as a victim — and those assumptions are surviving even the laws designed to challenge them.

Love in the Time of A.I. Companions

The New Yorker

These tools are arriving in a culture already accustomed to thinner and thinner forms of care. What they normalize is companionship stripped of reciprocity, obligation, and any expectation that care should ask something of us in return.

Computing in the Age of Decolonization

Rest of World

India spent decades pursuing technological sovereignty. What it built instead was a deeper dependence on the firms it set out to escape. Postcolonial ambition became a route to new forms of subordination — not because the ambition was wrong, but because the structures it confronted proved more adaptive than anyone anticipated.

Inside the Criminal World of Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds

Aeon

Workers trafficked into cybercrime compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar exist in a space where victim and perpetrator collapse into the same person. Nobody — not governments, not NGOs, not the workers themselves — has a clean name for what’s happening.

Instrumentalisation Is Making Everything a Means to an End

Aeon

Friendship improves health outcomes. Nature reduces cortisol. Art boosts creativity. When did we stop valuing anything for its own sake? The essay names a cultural inheritance so pervasive it is easy to miss: the belief that nothing matters unless it produces a measurable return.

Cultural Fluency Is the Strongest Currency for Media in 2026

Nieman Lab

Legacy media institutions abandoned cultural fluency precisely when it became most valuable. Now community-rooted outlets and culturally embedded creators are inheriting the audiences those institutions trained themselves not to see.

Ogoh-Ogoh

Field video, Ubud, Bali

The night before Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence, I watched communities parade enormous demon effigies called ogoh-ogoh through the streets, then stage their destruction in smoke and flares. These took months to build and lasted one evening. The ritual turns fear into something visible, public, and temporary — name what haunts you, build it so everyone can see it, then let it go.

Carol Myers was not accused of stealing. That was part of what unsettled her.

She had finished paying at a self-checkout in a Sainsbury’s in south London when a screen flashed red. An employee approached and told her she would need to be checked. Myers asked why. The employee could not say.

“My face popped up on the screen,” Myers told me. “Then when you pay, the system goes off and you need to get checked.”

The same thing happened weeks later at a Primark and H&M. And then again at a different location in Lewisham. Myers began noticing who was stopped and who was not.

“There were three white people in front of me,” she said. “They went through. The minute I went there, it happened.”

No one explained what she had been flagged for. No one explained how long the information would be kept or where else it might travel. No one had to.

Each time, the explanation was the same and delivered, as Myers described it, like a script. “It’s just a random check. It’s just the AI. It’s just doing it random, just to check.” She asked how it could be random if it kept happening to her, at different locations, on different days. No one had an answer for that either.

I am not British. I don’t live in London. But I am a Black man, and listening to Myers describe what happened to her felt like something I already knew— not because I had experienced the same technology, but because I recognized the structure. Someone in authority makes a decision about you. The decision is delivered without context. You are expected to comply first and understand later, if at all. The technology is new. The experience is not.

Myers is an IT teacher and a law student. She understood faster than most people would that what she was encountering was facial recognition, not a random check. But understanding the technology did not protect her from it. And it did not give her anywhere to direct her frustration.

“Who are you going to be upset at,” she asked. “The machine or the store clerk? They are doing their job.”

Myers compared the experience to stop and search encounters her sons began having when they were 12. In both cases, the reason was never personal. It was always the system.

But stop and search, however flawed, at least operated within a legal framework that required stated grounds. What happened to Myers required nothing. The machine decided and the employee delivered the news.

“It impacts you in a negative way,” she told me. “You’re spending your money and the algorithm is picking you as a Black person.”

She had just completed a transaction — the most ordinary, cooperative thing a person can do inside a store — and the system flagged her anyway. The receipt did not matter.

What Myers described mirrors facial-recognition systems now used across parts of the UK retail sector, including those operated by Facewatch, which runs in hundreds of stores. Myers had never heard of Facewatch before I mentioned it to her during our conversation. She did not consent to being scanned. She said she never saw a sign in any of the stores explaining that the technology was in use.

Retailers in the UK don’t need customer consent to use facial recognition. Campaigners argue that a small sign near an entrance tells shoppers very little about when they are being scanned, how long the data is kept, or where it goes next. These systems run on private contracts, not public law, but they rely on the same face-scanning logic used by police forces.

Metropolitan Police facial recognition systems in London wrongly flagged people as suspects in 80% of alerts in 2025. Eight out of 10 of those false alerts were Black people. Police scanned more than 3 million people across London in the past year alone.

Warren Rajah, a Black Londoner, was ejected from an Elephant & Castle Sainsbury’s in January 2026 after staff said the system flagged him as a shoplifter. He was not in the database. A spokesperson for Sainsbury’s told me the system had not made a mistake; an employee had stopped the wrong person. But Rajah had already been marked in front of other shoppers.

There is a distinction that seems small but changes everything: the difference between a wrong decision and an unexplained one. A wrong decision can, at least in theory, be corrected. An unexplained decision teaches you that correction was never part of the design.

Dr. Nessa Keddo, a senior lecturer at King’s College London who studies automation and creative labor, put it this way: “Algorithms decide what we see, who gets opportunities, how we’re categorized and judged.”

Keddo’s own path into this work started in advertising, where she spent more than a decade working on campaigns for brands like Disney and Adidas. She began noticing the problem from the back end of Meta’s business tools — who was included in audience measurement, who was excluded, and what happened when targeting became personal. Her clients were asking versions of the same questions her research would later formalize: what are we measuring, who is being left out, and what follows from that absence?

In creative industries, Keddo has watched algorithmic systems reshape labor without ever announcing the change. She told me entry-level workers, especially recent graduates, are often hit first. Roles that once required teams to brainstorm and build campaigns are compressed by automation. The jobs do not always disappear cleanly. They narrow. They thin out. Engagement drops. Opportunities dry up. People feel the consequences without being told what changed or whether it will change back. There is no one to appeal to and nothing clear to contest.

That dynamic becomes sharpest in policing, and it predates the current generation of AI tools.

Sara Chitseko, pre-crime program manager at Open Rights Group, was 16 when the Metropolitan Police began building the Gangs Matrix in 2012. She remembers it clearly because she had friends who were criminalized under it. The database emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 London riots, when Prime Minister David Cameron announced a “war on gangs” — language Chitseko describes as a dog whistle for Black youth.

At its peak in October 2017, the Matrix held 3,806 people. Seventy-eight percent were Black, even though Black Londoners made up only 27% of those convicted of serious youth violence. The vast majority of those listed were young Black men and boys. Being on the Matrix could get you denied housing, rejected from college and stripped of benefits. Young people often did not find out they were listed until a school, housing provider, or another institution told them they had been flagged. The police were not saying, You are on the Gangs Matrix. The consequences arrived first. The person affected had to work backward to figure out why.

Years later, after sustained pressure from communities and legal advocates, the Metropolitan Police admitted the database was unlawful and dismantled it. Chitseko said she was in her bedroom at her parents’ house when the news broke. Her phone lit up with messages. “Different people being like, have you seen it? It’s in the news,” she told me. “I think we’ve got there.”

But the victory came with a caveat. By the time the Matrix was dismantled, the data it contained had already been shared — with immigration, with housing providers, with other police systems. Trying to trace where it had all gone was, as Chitseko described it, “a web.” And when the Met announced it was replacing the Matrix with something called the Violence Harm Assessment, Chitseko recognized the logic immediately. Same structure. Different name.

“These systems don’t predict crime,” she said. “All they really predict is policing, because they’re based on past policing data.”

Historic police data, shaped by unequal enforcement, gets fed into models that reproduce those patterns while presenting the output as objective.

“If it’s discriminatory and unjust,” Chitseko said, “that’s just injustice delivered faster and at scale.”

Chitseko also cautioned against investing more money into making facial recognition more accurate. She said even if these systems were perfectly accurate, she still wouldn’t want to live in a world where her face was being scanned every day.

That matters because we keep talking about AI bias as though the deepest problem is accuracy, as though better training data or more representative datasets would solve what is happening here. But even a perfectly accurate system that never explains itself is still a system that has taken away your say in what happens to you. Accuracy does not restore what explanation would have provided.

The dismantling of the Gangs Matrix did not erase the data that had already been collected or undo every consequence of its use. But it interrupted a system that relied on silence. That interruption matters because it proved something these systems work hard to make us forget: their authority depends on consent, compliance, and the hope that no one asks too many questions.

I started reporting on technology to understand why it was not helping the people who needed it most. What I found, across two countries and several years, is that the tools already exist. They are everywhere. The question is who they are pointed at, and whether the people in their sights will ever be told why.

Myers told me she still shops in the same neighborhoods. She still pays attention to who is stopped and who is not.

“It’s devastating,” she said. “Everyone looks at you. It feels like you’ve done something wrong when you haven’t.”

Artificial intelligence did not create this vulnerability. It made it easier to enforce without explanation. But explanation is how power becomes visible. When it disappears, everything else becomes easier to take. ⁂

This essay builds on reporting for Coded Out, a three-part AI policy podcast I produced and hosted for The Black Policy Institute in London. The podcast featured interviews with Carol Myers, Dr. Nessa Keddo, and Sara Chitseko.

Earlier in INHERITANCE

Seven this week. I’d start with the one about Bisbee.

When AI Picks the Targets

The Washington Post

The story is not just that AI is now helping wage war in real time. It is that institutions built to diffuse responsibility have found a tool that can do it faster. When target selection starts to move at machine speed, the inheritance is not only technological power, but a familiar temptation to treat judgment as something that can be outsourced.

Can AI Save Local News?

The Wall Street Journal

The headline promises a story about technology. What it actually delivers is the inherited business model of American journalism — and how decades of institutional decay hollowed out the very thing local papers were built to do.

Is Inherited Wealth Bad?

Aeon

An economist makes a counterintuitive case: rising inheritances are a sign of a healthy economy, not a sick one. The numbers are interesting — a modest bequest can compress inequality among heirs because $100,000 is life-changing for someone with $50,000 and irrelevant to someone with $10 million. The essay never asks what happens to the people who inherit nothing at all.

Vigilantes at Dawn

Longreads

In 1917, armed men wearing white armbands rounded up nearly 1,200 striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona, forced them into cattle cars, and drove them into the desert. A century later, a journalist traces her great-grandfather’s escape over the mountains and asks the question that makes this more than a history piece: as deportation lists circulate again, what do the descendants of immigrants owe the dead — and the living?

35 and 1

Longreads

A woman’s son is born on the exact birthday of the brother she lost to an overdose a decade earlier. Out of 365 days, this one. What follows is an essay about grief, motherhood, and how absence keeps finding new places to live.

An Action-Figure Maker’s Outsized Tribute to His Late Brother

Aeon (short film, 15 mins)

A Scottish artist who builds handcrafted figurines of cultural icons turns, for the first time, to the person who taught him the craft: his brother, who died. The film is quiet and precise — hands working, memories surfacing — and it circles a question the artist never quite answers: whether he is building a tribute or trying to keep someone from disappearing entirely.

Poisonous Objects

The New York Review of Books

Carolina A. Miranda reviews two Los Angeles exhibitions examining what Confederate monuments do — not commemorate history, but enforce it. At MOCA, Kara Walker took a bronze equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson, cut it apart with a plasma cutter, and reassembled it into something monstrous. The piece asks a question the original sculptor never intended: if the monument was built to make white supremacy look noble, what does it look like when you strip the aesthetics away?

I spent two days trapped in an apartment in Cebu City that smelled faintly of rotting fruit and someone else’s bad decisions.

Ants moved across the floor in a clean line toward a takeout container the previous guest had left on the balcony. The balcony chair was broken. I learned that by nearly falling off it. The bathroom had no shower curtain, so every time I turned the water on, the floor flooded. In the lobby, signs asked residents to stop throwing trash and cigarettes off their balconies because other residents were complaining.

This was not the apartment I had paid for.

Or rather: it was exactly the apartment I had paid for, because the apartment I had paid for did not exist. What existed were photographs. A lobby shot taken at the perfect angle, lit like a hotel commercial. Wide, clean, and full of promise. What existed were reassuring messages from the hosts, who answered my questions so politely before booking that I thought I was making a smart decision. What existed was Airbnb’s larger promise that you could belong anywhere, that travel had been democratized, that the world was now yours to access on your terms.

What I got was a lie held together by a cancellation policy designed to trap me the moment I discovered the truth.

I had used Airbnb across Southeast Asia for months in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Da Nang, Hoi An, and Bali. Every booking had delivered what the photos promised, sometimes better. I knew what to look for. I knew what to ask. I knew what kinds of listings to avoid.

That trust is what made Cebu so disorienting. I did my due diligence. I still got scammed.

The lie is that ownership of property, access, and other people’s need for shelter is a path to freedom. That if you can position yourself between someone else’s labor and someone else’s need, you can extract value without producing anything. That this is not only acceptable but admirable. That this is wealth.

The hosts who owned my apartment in Cebu—Steve and Jane—were based in the same city. They were a few miles away. When I reported the problems, they offered to move me to a different unit and said they needed an hour to prepare it.

It wasn’t prepared.

The second unit had its own problems: more insects, more grime, a bathroom that looked like it had not been cleaned in weeks. When I asked them to honor the original two-week booking and refund the rest, they refused. They said they were following Airbnb policy.

And they were.

What made it worse was that they were not even doing the work themselves. They kept saying they could send the cleaner or the maintenance guy. Which meant the cleaner they hired had not removed the rotting food, scrubbed the grime, or checked for ants. Steve and Jane extracted rent without being present. Their cleaner got paid without actually cleaning.

Here’s how the trap works.

When you book a long-term stay on Airbnb — anything over 28 days — the cancellation policy is built to lock you in before you can discover what is wrong. For my booking, Airbnb’s standard Firm Long-Term policy meant that if I canceled thirty or more days before check-in, I would get a full refund. If I canceled with less than thirty days’ notice, the first month became nonrefundable. Once I checked in, I would need to give thirty days’ notice to shorten the stay. In practice, that meant I would still be paying for another month even if I wanted to leave immediately.

By the time I arrived and found the ants, the broken furniture, the grime, and the general decay, it was already too late. I was locked into paying for weeks of accommodation I would never have accepted had I known the truth.

The policy ensures that by the time you open the door and see reality, the money is already theirs. It is not a neutral framework. It is a mechanism that makes misrepresentation survivable for the host.

Steve and Jane matter here less as individuals than as examples of what Airbnb trains people to become.

They are not cartoon villains. They are true believers. They have absorbed what Airbnb has spent years teaching people to accept as normal: that property ownership is a passive income stream, that you can make money while you sleep, that you do not need to be present, attentive, or even especially competent as long as you control access to an asset someone else needs. They do not think they are running a scam. They think they are running a business.

But the work still has to get done somewhere. And when the hosts outsource it, the burden shifts again — to customer support, to contractors, and finally to the guest.

Except Airbnb’s customer support does not really do that work either.

I was passed among at least 18 different agents. None of them appeared to have read the previous messages. All of them repeated some version of the same script: they understood my frustration, but the cancellation policy was clear.

I kept sending documentation. Photos of the ants. Videos of the building. Screenshots of the hosts’ own messages acknowledging the problems. Each time, a new agent. Each time, the same answer.

Then I received this: “The documentation you have provided is unfortunately not sufficient for us to offer a full refund for this reservation.”

That was the point when the actual shape of the system became obvious.

The work goes to you. The guest. You become your own lawyer, documentarian, researcher, and advocate. You gather evidence, build a record, and keep escalating into a structure designed to wear you down. You become the person responsible for forcing accountability out of a platform that has made accountability everyone else’s problem.

That is the real cost of passive income. Not simply that no one does the work. It is that when the system fails, the only person left holding the bag is the one who never extracted a dime from it.

Airbnb’s origin story is now familiar. Two broke men in San Francisco rented out air mattresses during a design conference in 2007 and built a company on the idea that strangers could trust each other enough to share space.

That story is still on the website. It is still in the marketing. It is still what many of us believe, at least partly, when we book.

But the company that story describes does not exist anymore, if it ever did.

What exists now is a global platform with the reach of a hotel chain and the accountability of nobody. It is not treated as a landlord, so it has no obligation to maintain conditions. It is not treated as a hotelier, so it avoids many of the regulations that govern hospitality. It sits between categories and answers fully to neither. The hosts are independent. The platform is neutral. And when something goes wrong, the guest discovers that no one in the arrangement is actually responsible for anything.

And still, people keep using it. I keep using it. Not because it is trustworthy, but because for longer stays in parts of Southeast Asia, the alternatives are often either more expensive or less flexible. Airbnb built a market around that gap and made itself feel inevitable.

The promise was that you could have the intimacy of someone’s home without the impersonality of a hotel. What you often get instead is a cancellation policy that protects one side and a review system that asks you to trust a consensus that may not mean much at all.

I contacted Airbnb’s press office with three questions: how the company prevents cancellation policies from being used to protect fraudulent listings, what recourse guests have when listings are materially misrepresented after the refund window has closed, and whether it would intervene in my case given the documented evidence. I followed up with a question about the review process. As of publication, Airbnb had not responded.

I also filed complaints with the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry for fraudulent business practices and with the Department of Tourism for accommodation standards violations. I sent a demand letter through Airbnb’s own support system outlining what I believed were clear consumer-protection and breach-of-contract issues.

Eventually, Airbnb relented and gave me a full refund.

I won, but only because I had unusual advantages. I am a journalist. I know how to document. I know how to escalate. I know how to find the right email addresses and how to keep pressing when a system assumes most people will stop.

Most people probably do stop. Or cannot afford not to.

That matters more than my refund does.

Because even after the refund, the structure remained intact. The listing stayed up. The burden remained where it had always been: on the guest who notices the lie and then has to prove, repeatedly, that it is a lie.

Airbnb did not invent extraction. It inherited it from a much older tradition of landlordism that treats housing as an investment vehicle instead of a human need, and treats maintenance and care as costs to be minimized rather than obligations to be met.

And we accepted it. Not because it worked especially well, but because it felt inevitable. Because we inherited a faith that markets correct themselves, that reviews equal accountability and that access equals fairness. We rarely stop to ask who taught us that, or who benefits from our continuing to believe it.

The reviews that helped me decide became harder to trust once I understood what five stars actually measure. It doesn’t distinguish between a weekend guest who used the apartment as a place to sleep between bars and a two-week guest who opened every cabinet and found what was living inside. It doesn’t distinguish between a smooth check-in and working plumbing. It doesn’t account for the guest who noticed problems but didn’t want the confrontation of saying so. Forty-four people did not necessarily have the same stay. They answered from different thresholds, different lengths of stay, and different levels of scrutiny, and the platform compressed all of that into one reassuring number.

And now we’re all standing in the apartment we paid for: the one with the ants, the broken furniture, and the lobby signs begging people to stop throwing trash off their balconies. ⁂

Earlier in INHERITANCE

When most people hear the word inheritance, they think of money. Property. Maybe a last name.

But the most powerful things we inherit are invisible. Ideas about success. Definitions of safety. Assumptions about who belongs where, who deserves what, and what’s worth sacrificing for.

INHERITANCE traces them back to where they started — and shows you what they cost.

Here are five essays that show how.

The American Experiment

Why does America call itself an experiment — and who consented to be tested? The question started in a Maryland classroom. The answer took six years to write.

Colonial Echoes at the Checkout Counter

What everyday transactions reveal about race, power, and who gets forgiven. It starts at a counter in Vietnam, with a price that doesn’t make sense — and a feeling that does.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Owe You an Explanation

How AI systems are normalizing decisions no one has to justify. A Black woman is flagged at self-checkout in London. A man is ejected from a store for a match that wasn’t his. The technology is new. The experience is not.

Why OnlyFans Makes Sense

On broken promises, stagnant wages, and the market value of my feet. The financial contract you were raised to trust — school, degree, career, security — stopped delivering a long time ago. This essay is about what comes after.

The Slow Burn of Becoming

What nine years of survival taught me about ambition, legitimacy, and leaving. In 2016, I was 34 years old, broke, depressed, and living in Los Angeles. This is the essay about what happened next.

Every essay starts with the same question: What did you inherit, and what are you going to do about it? Welcome.

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LONGITUDE: 106.6297° E

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

This is the second entry in LONGITUDE, a series for paid subscribers told through place. The first was Bangkok.

Soundtrack: motorbike engines / honking through Quan 4 / Google Translate’s voice / Grab car notifications

I didn’t know what to call it before I got there.

Ho Chi Minh City is the official name. Saigon is what most locals still say, at least in the south, because it’s shorter and it’s what their parents called it and their grandparents called it before the war ended in 1975 and the name changed with it. The airport code is still SGN. The city’s biggest newspaper is still the Saigon Times. Both names exist at the same time, in the same conversations, and nobody seems to feel the need to choose.

I didn’t know that before I arrived. I also didn’t know a lot of things.

Growing up in the United States, what I absorbed about Vietnam came mostly through the filter of a war. I was born in 1982, seven years after it ended, but the images were everywhere. History textbooks. Movies. The way adults talked about it. If you asked me at 15 to picture Vietnam, I probably would have described rice paddies and straw hats and poverty. A country that America broke and never quite apologized for. A place that existed primarily as the setting for American trauma.

I don’t think anyone sat me down and said this directly. It was more ambient than that. The kind of understanding you inherit without anyone handing it to you, absorbed through curriculum and culture and the way a country talks about a place it once bombed.

So when the car from the airport turned onto the main road and I saw what was actually there, I didn’t know what to make of it at first. I just started recording on my phone.

The motorbikes were the first thing. Thousands of them, moving in patterns that looked like chaos from inside the car but clearly weren’t. Everyone wearing helmets. Drivers and passengers. In Bangkok, helmets had seemed optional. Here they were the rule. The bikes outnumbered cars by what felt like 10 to 1, weaving through intersections with a coordination I couldn’t decode, but that clearly worked because everyone kept moving and nobody crashed.

The buildings were the second thing. New construction everywhere. Glass towers. Cranes. Apartment complexes that looked like they were finished last month. This was not the Vietnam I was taught to imagine. This was a city that was building itself fast and didn’t need me to understand it.

I remember thinking: how much of what I thought I knew about this country was just American propaganda left over from a war that ended before I was born?

I lived in Quan 4, District 4, in a building overlooking the Saigon River.

The neighborhood is a small triangle of land surrounded by water, wedged between the tourist center of District 1 and the newer developments to the south. A bridge and a 10-minute walk separated me from the restaurants and landmarks most foreigners come to see. District 4 used to have a rough reputation decades ago. Now it’s mid-transformation, new high-rises going up along the riverfront while the older neighborhood continues behind them. Street vendors and wet markets and narrow alleys, all of it still there, just with cranes visible over the rooftops.

I chose it for the same reason I chose Bang Sue in Bangkok. I wanted to be close enough to access the center, but far enough that I wasn’t living inside it. I wanted a neighborhood that wasn’t performing for tourists.

✦ RELATED: LONGITUDE: 100.5018° E

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My apartment was nicer than I expected. New building. Clean. A view of the river from the balcony that I never got used to, not because it was spectacular in some postcard way, but because every time I looked at it I had the same thought: I live here right now. This is where I wake up.

My days had a rhythm.

Gym in the morning. Breakfast. Then I’d walk the neighborhood or catch a Grab across the bridge to District 1 and just take things in. In the evenings I was back in the apartment, working, aligning with London or US hours depending on the meetings. Some nights I would go out again. Some nights I would stay in.

It sounds simple because it was. I wasn’t on vacation. I was living my regular life with a different backdrop. That was the point.

But the backdrop changes things in ways you don’t expect.

My phone had to be charged at all times. Google Translate was how I communicated with anyone beyond pointing and gesturing. The Grab app was my only reliable way to get around. So I was always aware of my battery percentage in a way I never am at home. I would plan my outings around it. How long can I be out before I need to get back and charge? Can I make it to District 1 and back before my phone dies? If I get lost, do I have enough battery to call a car?

It sounds small. But it restructured my entire relationship with movement. Every time I left the apartment, there was a calculation happening underneath the exploration.

I got stared at a lot.

I don’t know if it was because I’m 6’3, or because I’m Black, or because I was almost always alone. Maybe all three. Maybe none. That’s the thing about being visibly foreign in a place where you can’t understand what anyone is saying around you. You become a surface for your own projections.

When I’d show up to restaurants, tours, activities, I almost always got the same question: alone? Just you? Said with genuine surprise, like solo wasn’t really an option they’d considered. I would say yes, and they’d look at me for a second before moving on.

I wrote about specific encounters from my time here in two other essays. One about what everyday transactions revealed about race, power, and who gets forgiven. Another about what a nail salon revealed about labor, currency, and the American passport I carry.

✦ RELATED: Colonial Echoes at the Checkout Counter

✦ RELATED: Assembly Line

Both of those deal with moments where I watched my inherited American frameworks collide with what was actually in front of me. I won’t retell them here. But something was running underneath both of them that I couldn’t see clearly until I had been in the city longer.

I arrived in Vietnam carrying an entire operating system built by the United States. A way of reading race, class, power, and history that was installed in me before I was old enough to question it. In America, that operating system mostly works. Or at least, it works well enough that you stop noticing it’s running.

In HCMC, it crashed constantly.

A woman at a checkout counter doesn’t smile at me the way she smiled at the white customer before me, and my American brain immediately starts running its program: racism, colonial history, who has power here, what does this gesture mean. But I’m in Vietnam. The program doesn’t apply the same way. Maybe it partially applies. Maybe it doesn’t apply at all. I can’t know, and not knowing is the point.

That uncertainty followed me everywhere. And over time, I started to realize that the discomfort wasn’t coming from Vietnam. It was coming from the fact that the only interpretive tools I had were American ones, and they kept producing answers that might be wrong.

I knew I was going to do a boat ride so I bought a ticket for a sunset river tour.

They gave us gelato and we watched the city from the deck. I went alone. The sun going down over a city of 14 million people, turning everything gold, then orange, then dark. By the time we docked, it was night. The whole city had changed color while I was sitting there.

And I thought about how when I was growing up, we didn’t have money for vacations. The only trips I remember were the five of us piling into a maroon Astro van and driving from Maryland to North Carolina or Georgia to visit grandparents. Eight hours, one row of backseat, three kids shoulder to shoulder fighting over who got stuck in the middle. My mom is from NC. My dad is from GA. That was travel.

No Disneyland. No flights anywhere. No passports until I was an adult.

So sitting on that boat, in that city, on that river, I wasn’t thinking about colonial echoes or algorithmic bias or inherited American propaganda. I was thinking, I’m here. In Saigon. On a boat. Eating gelato. And nobody in my family has ever done this.

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Last week, WIRED published a feature called “Inside the Gay Tech Mafia.” It named Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and Keith Rabois. It described pool parties in San Francisco, deal flow over dating apps, social networks that double as professional ones. The reporting was extensive. The illustrations of muscular torsos, a handshake emerging from between two men’s crotches, and a skyscraper standing in as a phallus were camp. The comments section caught fire. People called it homophobic. People called it gossip. People called it dangerous. People said it read like something from Gawker, or Breitbart, or the prelude to a new Lavender Scare.

I read it and thought: none of this is about me.

Not because I’m not gay. I am. Not because the subject doesn’t matter. It does. But because every person named, every party described, every network mapped in that piece operates inside a world that is specifically, almost exclusively, white. The essay never says this. It doesn’t have to. The illustrations did it for me. The bodies are white, the settings are San Francisco, and one source in the piece uses the phrase “Greco-Roman gays.”

This isn’t incidental. Over 80% of U.S. venture capitalists are men. Around 70% are white. Nearly 60% are white men. The rooms Bernard describes — the dinners, the deal flow, the social infrastructure that doubles as professional access — exist inside an industry where whiteness is the default at every level of power. The people she profiles are gay in a context where whiteness and wealth grant entry most queer people will never have. Bernard profiles a specific network. But the conversation her piece generated (and the reactions to it) collapsed that specificity into something universal by treating “gay” as if it were a single experience. As if the pool parties and the deal flow and the sexual social capital are available to anyone who happens to be queer and interested in tech.

They are not.

Bernard includes a statistic near the end of the piece, almost in passing. Between 2000 and 2022, only 0.5% of startup venture capital funding went to LGBTQ+ founders. She uses it to complicate the “mafia” narrative — if gay people controlled tech, the number would be higher.

She’s right. But that number deserves more weight than a complication.

The data comes from StartOut, which analyzed $2.1 trillion in funding across that period. More telling is performance: LGBTQ+ founders who do get funded create 36% more jobs, file 114% more patents, and produce 44% more exits, while raising 16% less capital. The talent is there. The money isn’t.

And within that already thin slice, there’s a hierarchy that mirrors every other hierarchy in venture capital. A 2023 report from Proud Ventures found that gay men raise a median of 22 times more in total funding than lesbian founders. One VC firm, Chasing Rainbows, noted that the gap is steepest for “intersectional queer founders, trans founders, and founders who act ‘too femme’ or ‘too butch.’”

So when WIRED describes a “gay tech mafia,” it is describing something real, but something very narrow. A network of wealthy white gay men whose proximity to capital, whiteness, and a particular version of masculinity gives them access to rooms that most queer people will never enter.

In 2024, seven organizations — including StartOut, BLCK VC, Diversity VC, and SomosVC — formed the Diversity Data Alliance to standardize demographic tracking across venture capital. As StartOut noted, improved tracking would be “vital” to understand funding for underrepresented intersectional entrepreneurs.

They don’t have the number yet.

We know that less than 3% of VC-funded startup founders are Black. But the intersections of Black and queer, Latinx and queer, and trans and a person of color remains largely unmeasured.

The “gay tech mafia” discourse assumes a universal queer experience of power and proximity. The data shows a steep gradient, and at the bottom of it, there isn’t even a measurement. You can’t be underfunded if no one is tracking whether you exist.

The comments on the WIRED piece are telling, but less for what they argue than for what they reveal about who gets to define the terms of the debate.

Some commenters called the piece homophobic. Some called it dangerous. Some said the framing — “mafia,” the sexualized illustrations, the implication that gay men leverage intimacy for professional gain — plays into stereotypes that have been used to harm queer people for decades. Those concerns aren’t baseless, especially now, when LGBTQ+ rights are under direct political attack. Others pushed back, pointing out that Bernard’s reporting describes how power networks function and that the discomfort isn’t with the behavior, but with who’s doing it. The strongest version is that straight men have built professional networks through social and sexual capital for centuries and nobody called it a mafia.

Both sides assume they’re debating whether the piece is fair to gay men. Neither is asking: which gay men?

One commenter, in two words, saw it clearly. “White. You forgot to state that they are white as well as gay.”

It had almost no engagement.

I am not arguing that Black gay men or other queer men of color are incapable of building the kind of networks Bernard describes. I am not arguing that proximity to power is inherently wrong. I am arguing that the conversation treats queerness as if it automatically confers shared experience, shared access, shared stakes — and it doesn’t. The networks in that piece were built by and for a very specific kind of gay man. The social infrastructure of venture capital is racially specific. The data confirms it. The question is about access.

And until someone counts the rest of us, the conversation will keep mistaking a very narrow corridor of privilege for the whole house. ⁂

Earlier in INHERITANCE

In 2016, I was 34 years old, broke, depressed, and living in Los Angeles.

I had moved there six years earlier to pursue acting. I was still taking classes, still auditioning, and still doing background and stand-in work. I was good enough to stay adjacent to the industry. Not good enough (or not willing enough) to build a life around it.

Financially, I was drowning. Emotionally, I was exhausted. Career-wise, I had nothing to show for six years except proximity.

I thought about moving back to Washington, D.C. That felt worse. D.C. had never felt like home. There was nothing to return to. Los Angeles, despite everything, did. For the first time in my life, I felt connected to a place.

So I stayed. And I decided to go back to school.

By the summer of 2017, I was unhoused.

I lived in my car for a year, from summer 2017 to summer 2018, while finishing my last year at community college and trying to get into USC. I rotated between parking spots each night in North Hollywood. I had a YMCA membership for showers. I learned which baristas would let me sit for hours over one cup of coffee. I learned to wake up before security made their rounds.

I learned the knock.

Three firm taps. The kind that says I know you’re in there.

I told myself it wasn’t “real” homelessness because I had a car. I had a gym membership. I was enrolled in school. I wasn’t on the street. But I was sleeping in parking lots and side streets. If that’s not homelessness, I don’t know what is.

In 2018, I transferred to USC. I graduated in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Then I stayed a bit longer to complete a master’s in public diplomacy, and another year to finish a thesis I could live with.

By the time I was done, I wasn’t sleeping in my car anymore. I had bylines. Eventually, I had a job at LAist 89.3. I was a journalist. Some of the first stories I reported were about homelessness.

I went to encampments in Echo Park, Skid Row, and Venice. I interviewed people living in tents, in cars, and on sidewalks — elderly people priced out of housing, LGBTQ+ youth kicked out by their families, and survivors of domestic violence with nowhere safe to go.

People knew my story by then. Articles were written about the guy who had been unhoused while finishing community college and now covered housing and homelessness in Los Angeles. It became part of my credibility. And I used it — not to exploit it, but to ask better questions. To know when someone was performing compassion while people slept on concrete.

But every interview landed the same way.

Someone would describe living in their car like the knock, the patrols, and trying to figure out where it was safe to park. I’d record audio, take notes, ask follow-ups, and think, I know this feeling.

I didn’t say anything because the moment I did, I would stop being the journalist and become the story. And I had worked too hard to become the journalist.

On paper, it worked. I won awards. I interviewed the mayor of Los Angeles. I was held up as proof that the system functions — that education redeems, that grit pays off, and that you can “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” (I hate this term) and turn that into legitimacy.

The same question returned.

Is this it?

I had felt it once before, in my twenties, in D.C., when I was making good money, driving expensive cars, and living in a beautiful apartment. Everything looked right. But something still felt wrong.

That feeling is what made me leave D.C. It’s what made me move to Los Angeles. And nearly 10 years later — with degrees, credentials, and a career — it came back.

I had done everything I was supposed to do. And I still felt precarious. One bad month away from the car. One policy change away from instability. The ladder never stopped shaking.

I was tired. Tired of reporting on a problem I had lived through while pretending neutrality was possible. Tired of a country that treated homelessness as a policy issue instead of a moral one. Tired of being cast as the acceptable outcome and evidence that if you just endure enough, the system will eventually reward you.

Because the truth was I had worked hard. And I was still exhausted. And I still didn’t feel safe.

✦ RELATED: The American Experiment

In early 2023, I left the United States.

I didn’t announce it. I didn’t make it a big deal. I just went.

I was in Paris when I received an offer of admission along with a partial scholarship from University College Dublin. Another degree. Another city. Another restart. I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep justifying my existence through credentials. I went anyway.

Dublin was cold, expensive, and disorienting. I studied responsible AI, user research, systems that claim to help while also automating harm. But I learned that I could step outside the identities I had built to survive.

There, I wasn’t the formerly unhoused journalist. I was just another international student.

By 2024, I was working in AI doing policy, storytelling, and implementation simply because it interested me. Because it felt like something I finally chose instead of inherited.

Over the next year, I moved through Paris again. Bangkok. Ho Chi Minh City. Hanoi. Da Nang. Hoi An. Bali. Cebu City.

Somewhere in that movement, I realized I didn’t need to return to the U.S. Not because I hated America, but because I no longer needed it to tell me who I am.

The person I was nearly a decade ago wouldn’t recognize me now.

In 2016, I was on the precipice of living in my car, convinced a degree would save me. In 2026, I’m living across Southeast Asia, working in AI, and writing about inheritance. I have multiple degrees. But none of them saved me.

What changed wasn’t my résumé. It was where I placed my sense of legitimacy.

Here’s the question that still returns:

What do you owe a country that let you sleep in your car?

Does that make me ungrateful? Disloyal? Someone who escaped and refused to look back? I don’t know. What I do know is that I stopped organizing my life around owing anything at all.

In numerology, 2025 was a nine-year — a year of endings, shedding, and closure. The last nine-year was 2016, the year before everything fell apart, the year I decided to stay in Los Angeles, and the year that set this cycle in motion.

Nine years later, that cycle is closing not from success, but from release.

From actor to unhoused student to journalist to researcher to writer. From Los Angeles to Dublin to Vietnam. From needing credentials to validate my place to trusting my own.

The Year of the Fire Horse begins today, according to the Chinese zodiac.

Fire Horses are restless, independent, resistant to authority. I’m a Water Dog — loyal, adaptive, intuitive. But something happens when you live long enough inside systems that don’t protect you.

You stop asking them to define you.

The cycle that began in 2016 is closed. Whatever comes next doesn’t need to make sense to anyone but me. ⁂

Artifacts

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I used to love watching the news. Not in an eat-your-vegetables way. I genuinely looked forward to it. I would come home and turn on MSNBC or CNN and watch the pundit roundtables the way other people watch sports. Who had the better argument. Who got caught off guard. Who said something so sharp the whole panel went silent. It was entertainment and education at the same time, and I never once thought of it as a chore.

Then I became a journalist, and following the news became work. I kept up because the job required it. I monitored feeds and breaking alerts and competitor coverage because falling behind meant falling behind. The pleasure didn’t disappear overnight. It just got buried under the professional obligation to always be current.

Then I left the newsroom. And without the requirement to stay plugged in, I started to notice how much of my news consumption had become automatic. I wasn’t choosing to be informed. I was just still doing it out of habit and some inherited sense that a person with my background should always know what’s going on.

I also deleted my social media accounts over a few years. X (formerly Twitter) went first, right around the time Elon Musk bought the platform and removed verified blue checkmarks from journalists and other trusted sources of information. When it disappeared, I remember thinking this platform just told everyone it no longer values the distinction between verified information and everything else. I didn’t need to stick around to see where that was heading. Instagram went next. Then TikTok. And finally LinkedIn, earlier this year.

And if I’m being honest, I don’t always know whether I’m as informed as I should be. That part nags at me.

Pew Research Center released a report this week called “Americans’ Complicated Relationship With News.” They surveyed more than 3,500 adults and ran nine focus groups. The findings describe something I recognized immediately.

Only 9% of Americans say they follow the news because they enjoy it.

Nearly a quarter say they do it only because they feel like they should. About half say it’s some mix of both. And 16% say they don’t follow the news at all. The country that invented the 24-hour news cycle has mostly stopped enjoying what it produces. Six in 10 have reduced how much news they consume overall. Two-thirds have dropped a specific source entirely. And yet, eight in 10 Americans still say people have a civic responsibility to be informed when they vote. They believe in the idea of an informed public. They’re just exhausted by the experience of trying to be one.

I know that exhaustion. I was reacting more than reading. My attention was thinning and I could feel it happening, but kept going because I thought that was what informed people did.

The report found that Americans are now split evenly between those who seek out news on purpose and those who just happen to come across it. Among adults under 30, nearly three-quarters say news finds them rather than the other way around. Among adults 65 and older, nearly three-quarters say the opposite.

I turn 44 this summer. I remember both versions. Choosing to turn on the television at a specific hour. Choosing to buy a newspaper. And then the gradual shift into news arriving without invitation, in every feed, on every app, and in push notifications I never signed up for.

More than half of adults under 50 say they’re worn out by news. About half say most of what they encounter doesn’t feel relevant to their lives. That tracks with what I saw when I spent a year in graduate school researching algorithmic bias on TikTok. Black LGBTQ+ creators told me they were being suppressed by the platform’s own systems, forced to avoid certain keywords and time their posts strategically just to reach their audiences. The information environment was never neutral. What reaches you has always been shaped by systems most people never see.

The report also measured how much Americans trust themselves versus each other when it comes to sorting out what’s accurate. Almost eight in 10 say they’re confident in their own ability to check whether a news story is true. But only about a quarter feel that way about other people. Everyone believes they can figure it out. Almost nobody believes anyone else can.

When Americans describe what “doing your own research” means, the most common answer is comparing information from different sources. But about seven in 10 also say it means questioning what major news organizations report. A similar share says it means questioning official or governmental sources. The phrase has become something people say when what they really mean is: I don’t trust the institutions that are supposed to tell me what’s happening.

I spent years producing news for an audience that increasingly felt that way. I watched the distrust grow. And at some point I realized I was developing my own version of it. Not the conspiratorial kind, but the kind where you’ve seen enough of how the machine works to know that what gets published is shaped by what gets clicked, what gets funded, and what fits the editorial window that day.

There’s a section of the Pew report about paying for news that I think about as someone who now publishes a paid newsletter. Only 8% of Americans believe people have a responsibility to pay for news. Only 16% have actually paid for any news source in the past year. When asked how news organizations should make their money, the most common answer was advertising.

One focus group participant said he can’t afford to subscribe to every writer he likes. Five dollars here, five dollars there. It adds up. He’s right.

I spent years inside newsrooms funded by advertising, and I know what that model does to editorial decisions. The stories that get traffic aren’t always the stories that matter. Paid subscriptions are imperfect. But they mean the reader is there on purpose.

I now subscribe to a handful of writers and publications I’ve chosen on purpose. Nothing arrives by algorithm. The volume is lower, and what comes through actually matters to me.

But I’d be lying if I said I’ve figured it all out. Some mornings I wonder if I’ve pulled back too far and if there’s something happening that I should know about and don’t. I wonder if the distance I’ve created between myself and the news is freedom or just avoidance dressed up as intention.

The Pew report’s most striking finding is the simplest one. When researchers asked Americans why they follow the news, the most honest answer from most people was: because I feel like I should.

I followed the news for that reason for a long time. I followed it because I loved it, and then because my job required it, and then because I thought I was supposed to. Somewhere along the way, the love part disappeared and I kept going on obligation alone.

I stopped. I’m still figuring out what comes after that. I suspect a lot of people are. ⁂

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🎧 Beyond the paywall: this essay includes recorded audio/video and a narrated version by me.

I saw two kids on a motorbike in Ubud. Neither looked older than 11. No helmets. One driving, the other holding on behind. They zipped past my car, confident, laughing, like this was the most natural thing in the world.

My first thought. Where are their parents? My second thought came automatically. Someone in the U.S. would call CPS.

I saw it again that day. And the next. Kids everywhere on motorbikes. Alone sometimes. Sometimes with a friend on the back. They’d pull up to warungs for snacks, park outside shops, weave through the narrow streets of Ubud like they’d been doing this their whole lives. Because they had.

I asked Agus, my driver, why I kept seeing this. I told him that when I was that age, we had bicycles. Not motorbikes. I laughed. He didn’t.

His English wasn’t quite good enough to explain what he wanted to say, so I asked him to speak in Indonesian. I recorded him while we drove:

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LONGITUDE: 100.5018° E

Bangkok, Thailand

Soundtrack: river ferries / ceiling fan hum / distant temple bells / the hiss of street grills

🎧 Audio version read by me available below for paid subscribers

I almost didn’t go.

Paris to Bangkok felt like too big a leap — not just geographically, but psychologically. I’d been to enough European cities by then. I knew how to navigate cobblestone streets and metro systems and menus I couldn’t quite read, but could mostly figure out. Europe made sense to me. Or at least it pretended to.

But Southeast Asia? I didn’t know the language. I couldn’t read the script. I didn’t know the unwritten rules — how to greet people, how to negotiate prices, whether it was rude to point or touch or make eye contact.

I was afraid of looking stupid. Of being lost. Of sweating through my carefully curated wardrobe in the first hour.

But I bought the ticket anyway.

The heat hit me the second I stepped outside Suvarnabhumi Airport.

It wasn’t weather. It was architecture. It surrounded me, pressed into me, followed me indoors. I’d never experienced anything like it. The humidity was physical — a weight on my skin, in my lungs, between my clothes and my body.

Nothing I brought was right.

My jeans clung to my legs. My shirt was dark with sweat before I even reached the train. I was carrying a jacket — a jacket! — because Paris had been cool when I left and I thought I might need it. I didn’t. I kept it with me, tucked it under my arm while moving through airports, adding weight and heat every time I traveled. I wouldn’t wear it again until Hanoi in December. But I wasn’t leaving it behind.

By the time I got to my apartment in Bang Sue, I looked like I’d been swimming. My shirt was stuck to my back, sweat pooling at my collar. I went straight for the AC and didn’t leave until night.

That’s when I learned the heat doesn’t stop. At 9 p.m. I was sweating the same way I had at noon. The humidity doesn’t care what time it is.

This was day one.

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“Do well in school. Go to college. Get your degree. That’s your ticket.”

I heard some version of that sentence my entire life. From teachers. From adults who meant well. From people who genuinely believed it. It wasn’t framed as advice so much as inevitability. If you followed the steps, the outcome would follow.

College equaled opportunity. Stability. A good job. A life that made sense.

That promise wasn’t invented out of thin air. For decades, it worked. A college degree did separate people economically. On average, degree-holders earn more and experience lower unemployment than people without one.

But “on average” leaves a lot of people out of the picture.

Over time, more and more people did exactly what they were told. In 1980, fewer than one in five adults had a bachelor’s degree. Today, it’s well over a third. The credential scaled. The payoff didn’t. The degree stopped being a differentiator and became a baseline. Just another box to check before you could even enter the conversation.

I didn’t follow the script neatly the first time around. I took a longer route. Eventually, though, I went back to school. Earned the degrees. Bought into the idea that this would be the thing that settled everything. That the math would finally work.

Instead, the math stopped working.

Wages crawled. Housing sprinted. Student debt ballooned. Entry-level jobs began requiring credentials they never needed before. Even now, many recent graduates are underemployed and working jobs that don’t actually require the degrees they were told were essential.

It’s not that education is useless. It’s that the promise attached to it became outdated while we kept repeating it.

That disillusionment shows up in who we side-eye.

Recent surveys reflect what many people already feel. Fewer Americans believe a four-year degree is worth going into significant debt for, and nearly half say it matters less now than it used to. The promise broke, and instead of rewriting it, we started policing the people who stopped believing first.

That’s where OnlyFans creators enter the chat.

Not the food bloggers or gaming streamers. The ones selling access to their bodies. The people posting nudes. The digital sex workers who’ve taken the oldest profession and made it direct. They attract a particular kind of contempt — lazy, unserious, desperate — but the backlash isn’t really about morality. It’s about timing.

They figured out faster than the rest of us that the old guarantees were gone. That loyalty to a system that no longer delivers isn’t virtue; it’s just fear of what comes next. And being right too early carries a social cost. You don’t get praised for seeing the collapse ahead of time. You get dismissed. Ridiculed. Treated as if you failed to understand the rules, rather than recognized that the rules had already changed.

That kind of clarity is uncomfortable for people still trying to make the traditional path work. It forces a question no one wants to answer yet: if this no longer adds up, what am I still defending?

Sometimes, I feel that tension personally.

Not in an abstract way. But in a very real, very human way. I’ve caught myself feeling jealous of their decisiveness. Of opting out cleanly instead of lingering in a system that keeps moving the goalposts. I’ve joked, half-serious, about how often I’m told I have nice feet and how absurd it is that I’m not monetizing that fact.

That’s when an old line from The Players Club starts echoing in my head: use what you got to get what you want.1

It’s usually framed as a punchline. Or a moral failing. But stripped down, it’s really just a statement about adaptation. About recognizing what the system rewards and deciding whether you’re willing to play by those rules — or keep pretending the old ones still apply.

I say all this to say that I understand the impulse now.

I understand why people look at the landscape, do the math, and opt out entirely. Why building something direct — audience to income, effort to reward — starts to feel less scandalous and more rational.

I’m not there yet.

But I’m close enough to admit why it makes sense.

Two seconds from OnlyFans. ⁂

1

The Players Club (1998), dir. Ice Cube. In this scene, Ronnie (played by Chrystale Wilson) is trying to recruit Diamond (LisaRaye McCoy) to work at the strip club where she works, dismissing Diamond’s retail job as “chump change.”

@blazetv03The Players Club Scene #ThePlayersClub

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