Returning briefly to That Topic with this screengrab, from Brian Merchant’s recent post on the Altman/Ive circlejerk:

Noted less for schadenfreude—though that’s definitely in the mix—than for how it tracks with very recent personal experience.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been sitting in on the latest run of collaborative foresight workshops with my good friends at Media Evolution, and throughout I’ve been genuinely and pleasantly surprised by the extraordinary level of caution and critique around not only Those Two Poorly-Defined Letters, but also around “tech” in general—to the extent that a lot of the last-afternoon discussions revolved around whether the “digital urban layers” which were the workshop topic were actually necessary at all.

Compared to workshops of a similar framing and topic that I sat in on just a year ago, this is an almost complete reversal of attitude, among a range of people drawn from the tech-adjacent professional middle-classes in one of the most wealthy and tech-saturated countries in the world.

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Altman?