Julian Thorne
Essays about technology and the people it's quietly rearranging — AI, privacy, attention, and the strange bargain of the modern web. Skeptical, but not cynical.
I write essays about technology for people who use it but don't build it — trying to explain not just how the machines work, but what they're doing to us while we're not looking. Clear, honest, and allergic to hype in both directions.
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Essays
The full collection.
On AI
Past the hype and the doom.
On privacy
The invisible economy of you.
On attention
The web's real product.
About
Who's writing, and why.
Newsletter
An essay when there's one worth sending.
Recent essays
The Confidence Machine
Why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't that it's wrong, but that it's wrong in exactly the tone of someone who's right.
You Are Not the Customer
The oldest rule of the free web, re-examined for the algorithmic age — and what it costs to forget it.