No AI Involved
The dance sequence at the end of this video directed by Romain Gavras is amazing. Precision chaos is the only way to describe it.
Author: Ian Kennedy
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Big Sound – Small Space
Wow. I was really excited to blog about Evan & Luke’s Williamsburg apartment studio based on a May 1st story that just popped up in my feed from Yahoo.
When I followed some of the links to find out more, I discovered that the video below was from 8 years ago and that the last video in their YouTube channel was from 5 years ago (victim of the pandemic?).
Curious why Yahoo would revive a story written so long ago and timestamp it from today. I suspect an old RSS feed was reconnected and sprung back to life w/o the proper meta-date to filter it out as old. Yet another case of why good data hygiene is important.
Nice story anyway – wonder what they’re up to today?
Once a month, roommates Evan and Luke transform their tiny Brooklyn apartment into a full music studio. Sometimes they manage to cram an entire orchestra complete with brass, strings, and percussion into every nook and cranny and, in the process, spark something rare these days, a uniquely human in the experience.
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The end of scale
It’s been over a year since The Messenger closed down and the lessons are even more stark today. The meltdown precipitated from a number of out-dated expectations. Social media algorithms are shunning general news content, Google has been re-calibrated to favor original, niche content and news consumption habits have changed considerably.
It’s kind of like running a restaurant on a busy street. If your goal is to touch as many consumers as possible (as The Messenger sought to do) the easiest way to achieve that is to make food quickly and throw it at passing cars hoping that people will 1.) have their window rolled down, 2.) will be hungry and 3.) will like what you’ve made. If your goal is to build an enduring business with a foundation of repeat customers your best bet is it invite them in, speak with them and hope they stay a while.
Mike Donoghue on LinkedInNews articles are a no longer a commodity that is profitable at scale. The age of infinite personalization (via AI) is upon us. Publishers that understand Liquid Content, information that can be adapted to it’s consumer, will prevail. The new moat will be unique archives of well-formatted content, rich with meta-data stored in dynamic data structures that can re-combine on-demand to meet a specific need. Adaptability is key because in this new world it is impossible to know if your growth will come from text snippets, short-form vertical video, interactive graphical representations of data, or audio summaries translated to Chinese.
In this world, the inverted pyramid is but one way to present what you have.
from How to structure an article: The inverted pyramid -
Social Media Marketing
I went to a panel yesterday where online retailers spoke about the changes AI has brought to their profession. Ugly Talk: Selling in the World Run by Algorithms. While a well-structured website with lots of meta-data around your catalog have become table-stakes, success or failure can also come from unexpected data layers in your checkout pages. Frank Pacheco from Nearly Natural spoke about how one of his SKUs sales dropped 75% overnight because of a shipping issue which extended delivery times beyond the usual Amazon two-day. Your supply chain and logistics is just as important to agentic commerce as your descriptions and prices.
As AI Agents and atomization of audiences into niche vertical markets will de-emphasize traditional marketing, social media still remains as an important marketing channel. As marketers try and optimize their sites to get mentioned in the AI Answer Engines, social media is one of the last resources to discover broad trends and what people are looking for in your product.
In this sense, social media marketing has become mainstream and often you’ll see traditional advertising campaigns shot to look like low-budget social media clips to try and emulate the unfiltered and honest perspective of a viral video. It rarely works as audiences can see right through that.
One of the first rules of social media marketing is that you should have faith in your product such that you can allow the customer to amplify your products and brand and remix and celebrate it.
There’s a right way
and a wrong way
Having your CEO reveal your latest “product” before anyone else can experience it is the antitheses of social media. The bland office, the tiny, tentative bite, not even mentioning that this behemoth has THREE slices of cheese, even the sign over his shoulder that says “petty” – these are all working against him.
That is, unless the goal is to generate mentions on reddit in which case, they win!
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Claude’s New Ads Challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Anthropic, makers of AI Assistant Claude, is going after their competition with a series of ads to designed to give users pause after the Open AI’s announcement that ads would be coming to their product, Chat GPT.
The campaign, Time and a Place, was envisioned by Mother London, extending Claude’s positioning from the Keep Thinking campaign.
The ads launched yesterday, timed for this weekend’s Super Bowl, which will feature two of the spots as detailed by AdWeek.
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The New Yorker archives
Went to visit the excellent selection of ephemera on display at the New York Public Library and picked out a few choice pieces to share.
Interview questions 
Font Catalog 
“In Cold Blood” draft 
“Spot” illustration 
Talk of the Town idea 
Telegram to EB White 
“I want more money!” 
Oct 1942 cover 
Pitch for “Hiroshima” 
“Hiroshima” issue 
JD Salinger letter 
Nabokov doesn’t like edits 
That famous cover 
Tina Brown’s rolodex 
Harold Ross’ mission statement A The Century of The New Yorker is free to the public on the third floor of the main Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 5th Avenue in Manhattan and well worth the time. The exhibit closes on February 26th.
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The Tyranny of Gift-Giving in Japan
My father moved our family to Tokyo in 1978. As a local, he had a great run sharing his observations of Japanese culture from a Western perspective in a collection of of essays collected in a now out-of-print book, Home Sweet Tokyo.
Here’s his take on the Japanese culture of gift-giving.
The Present Tyranny
By Rick Kennedy
Home Sweet Tokyo, 1988It is curious that in a society as dedicated to sweetness and harmony as that of Japan, a tradition as potentially disruptive as the ritual giving of gifts has been allowed to flourish. People don’t talk much about the consequences of indiscriminate gift giving for fear of being seen as mean, but it is clear that in Japan gifts are launched as missiles, serving, if rightly chosen, to stun the recipient, or as least to nudge him or her off balance.
As gift giving proliferates, it tends to be taken for granted, and so to achieve its purpose of impressing the other fellow with the giver’s scarcely controllable generosity, the preferred gift has to be seen to be twice as magnificent as any sane person would deem reasonable.
In this way the ante escalates. If I give you a cheap souvenir teaspoon stamped “Shizuoka, counterpunch with a packet of fine tea. I fight back with an antique teapot; you ambush me with a round trip for two to a luxury hotel on the grounds of a Sri Lankan tea plantation. I, panicking, present you with a one-third interest in Twinings… and so on until we are both bankrupt.
In Tokyo this annual escalation of gifts given takes place between companies who do business together: one company one year giving its client company ten cases of beer, the next twenty, the next forty, until all corridors, closets, washrooms, and space at the back of the recipient company’s garage are filled with brightly wrapped packages from Mitsukoshi Department Store. At the end of the gift-giving season, the employees of both companies thus locked in gift-giving combat must hire trucks to cart away their share of the bounty, wanted or not, to their own homes and garages.
At a higher level, the presidents of the companies involved will exchange exquisite lacquer boxes, larger ones every year, each requiring the attention of a master craftsman for several months and costing millions of yen. It is said that the hills outside Kyoto are heavily populated with subtle geniuses whose sole occupation is the crafting of fine lacquer boxes destined to be presented by the heads of Japanese industry to each other during the annual gift-giving seasons of o-chugen in the summer and o-seibo in the winter.
Escape from the gift-giving plague is impossible. On every train platform, boxes of the local specialty-pickles, bean cakes, rice cakes, fish cakes, twirligigs – are dutifully purchased by travelers (although they may only have gone overnight to Osaka to visit an aged aunt) to be taken back and presented to fellow office workers and neighbors as a gesture of their enduring concern.
The constant flow of gifts keeps the Japanese economy purring and out in front of the unsupercharged economies of nations that don’t indulge in frenzied gift giving. A good 15 percent of the revenue of the average department store is generated by gifts: boxes of bars of soap, cans of soup, tins of salad oil and pressed seaweed, matched bottles of wine and whiskey and 100-percent orange juice, and hampers of exotic foreign delicacies – a truly prodigious prodigality, as if to make up for the shameful thriftiness of the rest of the year.
Perhaps, though, this gift-giving reflex could be put to good use.
One hears that the American public continues to be concerned that they are buying more Japanese goods than Japanese consumers are buying American goods. Some Americans are evidentily itchier than ever about the trade imbalance and have convinced themselves that behind it all there lurks some great brooding conspiracy.
Would not an appropriate gift serve to ease the tension? Why don’t the Japanese people simply present the American people with a massive present, perhaps a video game or a motor scooter for everyone, or a new national railroad system (staffed by supernumerary JR railroad men), or maybe, because after all it is the thought that counts, an enormous lacquer box?
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Universal Scale
At the American Museum of Natural History in NYC is the Scales of the Universe. In the center of a large atrium is the Hayden Sphere which serves as a point of reference around which other objects are placed to give you a sense of scale.
26.5 meters (87 feet) in diameter—represents the size of the Sun, then Jupiter stretches 2.7 meters (9 feet) across, while Earth is a mere 24 centimeters (9.5 inches) in diameter.
While the Hayden Sphere gives a sense of size, there is another exhibit that
There’s another globe, 12 feet in diameter so much smaller than the Hayden Sphere, in the lobby of the Daily News Building on 42nd Street, right off 2nd Avenue. This exhibit illustrates scale in another way, distance.
If the Sun were the size of the globe and placed here then comparitively: The Moon would be 1/3 inch in diameter and placed at the main enterace to Grand Central Terminal.
Using this as a baseline, I used ChatGPT to work out the distance to the rest of the planets.
If you use the globe in the first floor of the Daily News building in New York City on 42nd Street. As a scale model of the solar system, how far to the sun?
1. Size of the lobby globe (Earth)
The rotating globe in the lobby is 12 feet in diameter.
2. Scale relative to the real Earth
Real Earth diameter ≈ 7,917.5 miles
Scale factor:
- 7,917.5 miles → 12 feet
- 1 foot on the model = ~660 miles in reality
3. Distance to the Sun on this scale
Real Earth–Sun distance ≈ 93,000,000 miles
Convert to model distance:
Convert to miles:
If the lobby globe is used as a scale model of the Earth, the Sun would be about 27 miles away. I then drew a circle around the Daily News Building with a radius of 27 miles. This put the sun at Morristown, NJ.
I next asked GPT to generate a Google Maps KML file with all the planets and their approximate distances using the earlier one foot = 660 miles scale.
Kinda a nerdy thing to do on a day off, but now you know.
- the Sun is in Morristown, NJ
- Mercury orbit takes it over Summit and Montville, NJ.
- Venus orbits over Newark Airport and Edison and Hacketstown to the West.
- Earth is at 42nd & 2nd with the Moon at Grand Central. It’s orbit takes it as far south as South Brunswick and Clinton to the West.
- Mars orbits over by White Plains, NY and Allentown, PA to the West.
- Jupiter’s orbit takes it over Albany, NY to the North, Springfield, MA to the East, Harrisburg to the West and almost to Baltimore to the South.
- Saturn is out over the Atlantic, past Boston to the Northeast and into Canada in the Northwest. Down South it orbit is almost to Richmond, VA and Harrisburg, PA to the West.
- Uranus orbits out past Detroit and almost to Cincinnati in the West and as far south as Myrtle Beach, SC.
- Neptune’s orbit takes you out to Bermuda to the East, Jacksonville, FL in the South, St. Louis in the West and deep into Canada in the North.
- Pluto’s orbit takes it as far South as Miami and over Kansas City to the West and into Newfoundland in the Northeast and Winnipeg to the Northwest.
You can interact with it here.
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How AI Redefined Access and Ownership in 2025
Tried something different this year, asked ChatGPT to summarize the year for me.
One benefit of having the entire archive of this blog part of OpenAI’s learning model is that it can spit back what it’s learned, not only in substance but also in tone. It’s uncanny.
Here’s how ChatGPT responded:
Absolutely — based on Ian Kennedy’s actual writing on everwas.com (which covers tech policy, AI’s impact on the open web, local NYC issues, and personal essays), a hypothetical 2025 Year-in-Review blog post from him would blend thoughtful analysis of tech trends with sharp local and cultural commentary.
Here’s how Ian Kennedy of everwas.com might write a “2025: A Year in Review” post:
2025 felt like the year the internet finally stopped pretending it was the open playground of ideas and began behaving like what it’s actually become: a contested battleground where ownership, access, and value are constantly being negotiated — not just by corporations, but by governments, communities, and the technology itself.
AI Changed the Web — But Not in the Way We Expected
At the start of the year, conversations around artificial intelligence were dominated by shiny demos and sci-fi ethics. By year’s end, the conversation shifted to who owns the data and who gets paid for it.
Policy makers, IAB task forces, and publishers around the world began framing the debate in terms of rights and compensation, not just innovation. The old model where content was indexed freely by search and repurposed by AI is now being replaced by a future where:
- Publishers insist on licensing and metered access
- AI crawlers are treated like commercial participants
- Content is tokenized and monetized rather than scraped for free
This wasn’t just theory — it became a reality for countless newsrooms and creators struggling to survive in an era where AI can answer queries without sending anyone to click a link.
Cloud Infrastructure vs. the Power Grid
Machine learning isn’t just a software problem. The massive energy demands of data centers pushing GPUs to their limit became a real infrastructure challenge this year. We saw:
- Idle data centers waiting for electricity capacity to catch up
- Experimental approaches like repurposed jet engines and space-based solar projects
- Real worries about quality of life when computing giants annex local power grids
The future of “compute anywhere” suddenly looks a lot more tied to where the electrons actually come from.
New York Showed the Rest of the Country
Living in this city means Local often becomes National. In 2025 New York city was a microcosm of the larger cultural and political shifts:
- A mayoral election turned on cost of living and democracy reform
- Community voice battled casino development bids on the East River
- Neighborhood tech events and decentralized meetups flourished alongside big conference circuits
The city didn’t just make headlines — it embodied the tension between grassroots citizen engagement and centralized power.
Tech Week, Brand Conversations, and the (Un)Informed Public
2025 also saw a subtle but unmistakable shift in how technology and culture engage:
- The growing success of events such as NYC Tech Week and Tech:NYC AI Demos which felt less like corporate showcases and more like community patchwork gatherings
- Branding in an AI-driven world became less about identity and more about trust and permission
- Conversations about Google, Perplexity, and discovery technology moved from technologist circles into mainstream debate
It’s hard to overstate how much that matters. When ordinary people begin arguing about the future of search and discovery, the underlying structure of the web itself has already changed.
Personal Notes from the Year
Beyond the geopolitical and technological, 2025 was also a year of small perspectives — hikes, travel, and moments that reveal a deeper truth about why culture still matters even when platforms shift.
Whether it was a hike near Kamakura or a rumination on a slow waterfall (ed. this is a pretty funny interpretation of this post), these personal essays reminded readers that tech is not just code — it’s lived experience.
Looking Ahead to 2026
If 2025 taught us one thing, it’s this:
- The open web is not going quietly into the night — it’s being re-defined.
- Access now has a price tag, and that price is up for negotiation.
- The people using the technology are just as important as the companies building it.
The next year won’t be about whether the web changes — it’ll be about who gets to shape that change.
Here’s to the debates, the fights, and the small stories that make it all worth caring about.