Presence also extended beyond simple typing into features like reactions. Double-tapping a friend's chat bubble placed a heart exactly where you tapped, along with a faint animated circle and a simultaneous haptic felt by both users. This visually (and physically) pinpointed precisely what you were reacting to and when, creating the sense of a truly shared space.
There is a sickness, a striving, that pollutes the purity of what building a business should be. Because growth attracts headlines and seduces investors, companies over-optimize on growth metrics in their early years. In the end, it ruins them.
In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer "can it be made?" but "is it worth making?" The frontier isn’t volume—it’s *discernment*. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill.
Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.
There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you *want* to want.
Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what’s happening in L.A. varies considerably.
In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes.
His racist, isolationist policies would divide our country, and American innovation would suffer. But the man himself is even more dangerous than his policies. He's erratic, abusive, and prone to fits of rage.