They packed the room, standing room only. A sold-out crowd gathered at the feature session at SXSW, drawn by a voice that refuses to be ignored. Emma Lembke took the stage not just as an activist, not just as a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, but as the conscience of a generation suffocating under the weight of an exploitative digital world.

Her message was clear: “Social media isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed: to capture, to addict, to manipulate, and to profit off the psychological vulnerabilities of its users. And for Gen Z, that design has resulted in a mental health catastrophe.”

Lembke didn’t just speak about her own experience. She spoke for others: “The millions who have felt their self-worth measured in likes and comments. The millions who have been preyed upon by algorithms pushing eating disorders, self-harm content, and toxic beauty standards. The millions who have felt their attention spans shredded, their relationships eroded, their sense of self hijacked by the infinite scroll.”Big Tech’s Dirty Secrets Are No Longer Secrets

In this newsletter, we explore AI agents: what they are, recent breakthroughs (last week was big), the risks they pose, and how autonomous AI agents might integrate with a vision for the People’s Internet.

What are AI agents?
Unlike AI chatbots, which respond to user prompts in a single interface, AI agents can autonomously complete multi-step tasks—like researching and booking flights—across multiple systems. While chatbots facilitate back-and-forth interactions, AI agents allow users to delegate entire tasks or projects and let them run independently.

AI agents also differ from AI companions, which are chatbots specifically engineered for emotional connection and social interaction.

The People’s Internet
Beyond concerns over data privacy, surveillance, and security, AI agents challenge our understanding of how we interact with the internet—and our role within it.

America’s least understood and most efficient cabinet agency, explained

But the truth is, education is not and never was federalized. The Department of Education does not employ any teachers or run any schools. It’s statutorily prohibited from dictating what is taught in schools, how it’s taught, or when it’s taught.

Everything the Department of Education actually does falls into five categories:

• Making large foundational investments in schools serving low-income students and students with disabilities and enforcing associated requirements for states to educate the most disadvantaged children in society
• Running the student loan and grant programs that help about 10 million students a year and managing loan repayment for 40 million Americans
• Enforcing civil rights laws to ensure that students aren’t discriminated against because of their race, sex, or national origin
• Compiling data on education, tracking national educational progress, and funding research to figure out what works
• Administering a range of smaller grant programs for things like charter schools, programming for homeless and foster youth, college access, and institutional support for lower-resourced colleges.

We have an intelligence community that is blind and deaf, run by idiots, lead by a madman. What could go wrong?

I thought Peace was the idea?
Maybe I missed a memo, but I thought the goal was de-escalation. Last time I checked, the Houthis weren’t actively launching missiles at U.S. or international shipping. Yes, there were threats. Yes, there was saber-rattling. But threats aren’t missiles, and talk isn’t an attack.

There are only three reasons to abandon deterrence doctrine and strike first:

1. A clear, imminent threat – A preemptive strike makes sense if an enemy is about to attack and taking them out first prevents mass casualties.
2. A political motive – A president desperate for a show of strength to distract from domestic problems.
3. A strategic shift – A deliberate move to change U.S. doctrine from deterrence to something more aggressive.

The Financial Times reports on what I have been concerned with and writing about for some time, there is a decline in cognitive abilities across society. From attention, to reasoning and literacy plus other essential life ‘skills’, there is a general dumbing down of society.

The Financial Times reports on what I have been concerned with and writing about for some time, there is a decline in cognitive abilities across society. From attention, to reasoning and literacy plus other essential life ‘skills’, there is a general dumbing down of society.

Finally, I would advise young people to go long substance and short on status (a university degree as status is folly). By which I mean study those subjects that are substantive and valuable for the jobs you want, it is astonishing how many conversations I have had with first year students who have no idea what they want to do with their lives (the same applies to many students after 4/5 years of Masters studies).

And one of Carney’s first policy moves as PM was to order a review of Canada’s plan to buy a substantial number of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets. This means that Canada is joining European nations that are similarly reconsidering their dependence on U.S. weapons.

And this observation got me thinking. How much economic damage will America suffer because it has become a rogue nation? Of course, there’s much more than money at stake here. Still, becoming a nation that can’t be trusted to honor agreements or follow the rule of law has to have monetary as well as political and diplomatic consequences. How big are these monetary consequences?

Well, I’ve been exploring the available data, and U.S. exposure to foreign revulsion looks quite large.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s podcast debut with Turning Point USA’s co-founder and CEO Charlie Kirk reveals an irrefutable truth: Conservatives are winning the youth messaging war. Though the LA Times called their exchange “full-on cringe,” Kirk’s journey from “a card table and a debate me sign” to political influence offers critical insights into Gen Z’s rightward shift. Despite growing backlash to Trump’s economic policies and falling approval ratings among young voters, the conservative approach to messaging continues to resonate in ways Democrats struggle to match.

#1: Survival Economics: The Message Democrats Missed
The most obvious but somehow overlooked insight from the Kirk-Newsom conversation is the primacy of economic concerns for young voters. Zoomers I spoke with felt Democrats relied too heavily on messaging around issues like abortion rights and democratic norms, as well as celebrity endorsements from figures like Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion.

But first, I want to highlight what I find to be the most significant and underplayed story of the week, which is Apple shocking the tech press and its most diehard fans by admitting that it can’t actually build Apple Intelligence, the big upgrade play it has been promising and Wall Street had been expecting.

AI promised to shake up this dynamic, to give Apple back some spark. Last year, the phone giant introduced the brand Apple Intelligence. This would be a computing transition, perhaps as important as the shift from mainframes to personal computers, or desktops to mobile. You would no longer have to touch or type, you could just talk to your machine, and have it talk back or do what you want.