Insights
Briefings
Short-form analysis of non-human traffic, synthetic data, AI infrastructure, and the shifting economics of the internet.
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2026
- Google Is the East India Company of the InternetTwo years after I first made this comparison, the courts have said out loud what the metaphor implied: a private company that became a government over the internet’s trade routes.
- The Order of Collapse: Which TMT Pillar Caved to Automation FirstTelecom, media, and technology did not fall to automation at once. They caved in order: telecom, then media, then tech. And the sequence follows one rule.
- Catching Rain: Why Internet Advertising Works, and Why Marketers Still Go ThirstyA Futureproof TMT perspective on marketing funnels, walled gardens, the open web, and CleanTap. Internet advertising works, but only through collection and concentration.
2025
- Selling Media vs. Selling Ad SpacePipes versus hoses. Why conflating the content people want with the space next to it quietly distorts the whole advertising market.
- Why LLM Chatbots Must Detect and Avoid BotsStatic publishers never paid a marginal cost to serve a bot, so they never built defenses. For LLM providers, every interaction is expensive, which finally aligns incentives with integrity.
- Robocalls and VOIP: Bots in TelecomTelecom was the first of the three TMT pillars to cave to automation running amok. The robocall is one of the oldest forms of automated abuse in the sector, and its defenses are a preview of everyone else’s.
- Page Views, Impressions, and Streams: Bots in MediaMedia pays for units it cannot physically inspect. When the unit is synthetic, the whole valuation chain inherits the lie.
- The Web Was Built for Crawlers, Not Steppers: Bots in TechThe web’s founding protocols assumed automated readers were welcome. That original sin is why the technology layer has the weakest bot defenses of all.
- Culture, Connectivity, and CapacityThree forces set the ceiling on what the internet can carry: what people want to say, what the pipes can hold, and what the taps will allow.
- Goodhart’s Law and Its CorollaryWhen a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. The corollary is worse: the absence of a measure is not the absence of the thing.
- AdTech: The Sprinklers of the TMT SectorWe went from digging trenches that guide river water to fields, to spraying a fine mist and hoping some lands. What that shift costs.
- The Dangers of Averages in Bidding AutomationAn automated bidder tuned to the average underbids on gold and overbids on junk. The mean is where value goes to hide.
- The MiMa Index: Micro vs. Macro Problem-SolvingA simple binary lens for any TMT problem: is it micro or macro, and are you patching a symptom or re-architecting the system?
- Abstractions, Tokenization, and the Machinery of EnshittificationEvery layer of abstraction strips out nuance to make things tradeable. Standardize far enough and you get a token, and the conditions for decay.
- RPA vs. Agentic: What Actually ChangedRobotic process automation followed a script. Agentic systems choose the next step. That single difference resets every assumption about detection.
- Detection vs. Verification: Why Incrimination Costs More Than ExonerationProving something is a bot is expensive and open-ended. Proving something is human can be cheap and bounded. That asymmetry should shape system design.
- The BlackBerry Movie Is the Big Short for the InternetA film about a dying phone company is secretly the clearest lesson available on data constraints, security versus interoperability, and monetizing abstractions.
- 12 Lessons After 12 Years in AdTechA field guide from a decade-plus of chasing counterfeit traffic: what held up, what didn’t, and what I wish someone had told me at year one.
- The AI Seismograph: Measuring the Floods of Synthetic DataWe have no shared instrument for how much of what we see is synthetic. We need a scale: a way to read the waves of machine-made information.
- Mister Cloud: Digital Foundations for Our Youngest (and Oldest) Internet UsersA concept for teaching the most vulnerable internet users how to perceive and question the screens around them, before the automated internet teaches them first.
- The TMT Water AnalogyMedia is water, telecom is the pipes, and technology is the taps. A single mental model for how the TMT sector actually moves, and meters, demand.
- What Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” Taught Me About Brand SafetyA comedy special is the sharpest brief on brand-safety verification I know, because it names the internet’s core offer: anything, all of the time, right next to everything else.
2024
- Banner Ads vs. CTV Ads: Raindrops and a ReservoirA banner impression is a raindrop. A connected-TV ad is a reservoir. The market trades them as the same unit, and that is the whole problem.
- Snowflakes in an Avalanche: RTB and Data PurgesEvery bid request is a unique snowflake. They arrive as an avalanche and melt on contact. The system generates data too specific to keep and too voluminous to audit.
- Pencils and Sharpeners: The Impermanence of High-Volume GoodsWhen a good is made and consumed by the billion (pencils, impressions, page views), the unit becomes disposable and value migrates to the flow. So does the blind spot.
- Digital Hydrology: When Data Centers Meet Actual FarmsCompute, water, land, and heat are one system. If data centers and farms share the same watershed, treat data flow like hydrology and compute like a crop.
- Interoperability: Hoses, Attachments, and SprayersInteroperability is a garden hose with attachments. It only works because the threading is standardized. RTB's minimum standards are that boring, load-bearing thread.
- IoT Is Coming for the TMT SectorThe Internet of Things points toward far more devices online than there are humans. Most of the coming "thirst" is machines, and our measurement assumes it is people.
- The Internet CarnivalThe modern internet is a carnival built to separate you from your attention and your money. Fraud thrives here because spectacle is the point. The rigged game hides in plain sight among the lights.
- "Shake to Report a Bug" Is Quiet Bot DefenseThe shake-your-phone gesture is a subtle anti-bot check. It demands a physical accelerometer motion that cheap scripts cannot fake, friction that only humans clear, hiding as a feature.
- Web Ad Supply Shrinks as Publishers Raise Their WallsAs publishers ramp up defenses against AI scraping, they also shrink the open display ad supply. Defending your content contracts the commons. The ad-supported web gets smaller, one wall at a time.
- Synthetic Consumer Meets Synthetic CreatorAI content made by machines, consumed by other machines, measured as if a human were present. When both ends of the loop are synthetic, what exactly is being valued, and who is paying for it?
- What a Brazilian Passport and the Pluto.tv App Have in CommonBoth are prime cover for counterfeiters, because each spans a huge, varied swath of legitimate supply. Diversity of real inventory is exactly what a fake blends into. A lesson in why heterogeneous supply is hard to police.
- Scam Likely: Over-Blocking vs. Under-BlockingScam Likely warns instead of blocks. Why? Weigh the cost of a false positive, killing a real, wanted call, against a false negative that lets a scam through. A meditation on where to set the threshold and who bears the error.
- Measuring Things: Why We Have So Much Digital DataWe do not have oceans of digital data because it is all meaningful. We have it because digital systems can measure cheaply, and because whatever can be measured can be monetized. The volume is exhaust.
- Regression, Correlation, and the Tyranny of the PastRegression forces a pattern onto data without proving cause. Correlation dressed as insight. Most predictive analytics just replay the past forward. We call it prediction; it is mostly extrapolation.
- What TV Ratings MissedPanel-based ratings told networks inflated, distorted stories about who was watching, skewed by class, race, age, and education. Streaming counts run on server math: truer, scarier, and forcing a rearchitecture.
- Has RTB Actually Gotten Faster?The rest of computing got dramatically faster and smarter. Real-time bidding has been stuck behind a fixed latency budget and legacy plumbing. Ask why, and what the stagnation reveals about its incentives.
- Measuring Cultural Events: National vs. GlobalHow do you count attention to a match, a finale, or a song when it spills across borders, platforms, and time zones? National measurement frameworks fracture on planetary, asynchronous audiences.
- Third-Party Verification: Veto or Suggestion?Should a verification vendor block a transaction or merely advise it? The answer decides who bears the cost when the vendor is wrong, and how much real power the "independent" checker holds.
- Branding Is the Business of Conventionalizing AbstractionsA successful brand stops standing for a company and starts standing in for a category. That substitution is the whole game.
- Sodium Bicarbonate vs. Baking SodaThe everyday name is so convenient we forget it points at an actual compound. Cheap when the stakes are cookies. Expensive elsewhere.
- Politics Is an Abstraction of CivicsCivics is the shared work of living together. Politics is the tradeable token stamped on top of it. We keep trading the token.
- Binary Forced Abstraction. Can Quantum Restore Reality?On/off computing made the digital world an abstraction of reality, not a faithful copy. A non-dualistic substrate might change the relationship.
- Borders vs. BoundariesA border is a line drawn on a map. A boundary is a limit actually felt and respected. South Asia has plenty of the first and little of the second.
- Reciprocal vs. ReciprocationReciprocal means inverse. Reciprocation means equal return. We conflate them, and the confusion quietly warps how we reason about fairness.
- The Bidstream vs. the BitstreamTwo flows fight for the same pipes. One is the content you came for. The other is a description of you, sold in real time. Guess which one is winning.
- Agentic SaaS Meets Automation DetectionUnsanctioned automation inside a platform UI is sandpaper. It does not break defenses. It wears them down, pass after pass, until there is nothing left to detect.
- A Field Guide to AI, Year by Year: 2022-2025Each year of the AI boom demanded a different literacy. Miss the year, miss the skill. Here is what you actually needed to learn, and when.
- Who Actually Owns On-Device AI?Apple, Samsung, Huawei all claim on-device intelligence. But is it their model, or is it Android-and-Google in a hardware costume? The badge and the brains are not the same thing.
- AI-Generated Posts: From the Platform, or From a Person?The friendly neighbor in your feed may not be a neighbor. When the platform starts writing posts and signing them as its users, the community feed becomes a stage set.
- The SaaS Cost Stack: From Invoice to LandEvery SaaS invoice sits on a descending pyramid: subscription over tokens over compute over energy, minerals, and dirt. Follow the cost down and you find what software margin is really made of.
- The Gainshare Consulting SystemFutureproof TMT earns more only when the client keeps more. The operating logic: define the baseline, change the system, verify the delta, share the gain. Outcomes, not hours.
- Are Your Tools Fit for Purpose? Try Them On Like ClothesAssessing whether your enterprise tools still fit is like trying on clothes. First: do they still fit? Then: are they actually useful? Nostalgia is not a procurement criterion.
- The Business of BusynessThe 9-to-5 in Silicon Valley turned busyness into a performance and a product, distinct from, and often opposed to, actual productivity. Being visibly busy became the deliverable.
- Demoted by Children: A Natural New World OrderBecoming a parent reorders your priorities and status overnight. It is a humbling, clarifying demotion: outranked by a baby, and better for it.
- Passive Feasting: The American Diet of MediaThe American diet, of food and of media, is passive feasting: endless, frictionless consumption that asks nothing of you. A case for deliberate hunger.
- The Internet Went from Library to WarehouseThe internet used to be a library, organized for knowledge, discovery, and serendipity. It became a warehouse, organized for retrieval, merchandising, and throughput.