🔥 New Gitcoin site just dropped
Why? The funding landscape is fragmented. Lessons aren't being shared. Experiments are happening in isolation.
So we built a living reference: the tools, the teams, the research, the results. All in one place.
Turning hard-won experience into something everyone can use → https://t.co/HBwv9YVAYX
Here's what's on it 👇🧵
Something feels off online.
One post gets thousands of views, but the replies feel hollow. Another post makes the same point and gets no visibility at all.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if this thing is even on.
And this week, the numbers caught up to the feeling: Cloudflare’s CEO said bots have surpassed humans in web traffic for the first time.
Being human is no longer the default in a place that meaningfully shapes our lives.
The most valuable thing now might be rebuilding our places, so presence feels trustworthy and we can know what's real again.
@myswerve > remember when meta patented an ai that keeps posting as you after you die
what a concerning new thread to add to the right to be forgotten convo 🫠
Just for funsies, I just revived the OG @gitcoin Avatar Builder - mix-and-match your likeness from 937k+ free permutations. Pick a style, swap parts, recolor, download your PNG. No wallet, no signup.
https://t.co/jhgGZBxtEr
Four companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta – are projected to spend ~$700B on AI infrastructure this year, close to double what they spent in 2025.
Whoever owns the infrastructure sets the rules everyone else has to build around – and when the frontier AI compute layer sits inside four balance sheets, the rest of us are building on borrowed ground.
Power concentration this fast is hard to see when it's happening.
Trying to name it anyway is the first step toward building a different path.
Our phones know where we sleep, what we search for at 2am, and who we stop talking to.
We're forced to subscribe to our toothbrushes. Our lawnmowers. Our refrigerators. Our cars.
Our feeds know our anxieties, our preferences, and our deepest convictions.
And all of this data – this intimate record of our lived experiences – somehow doesn’t even belong to us.
Worse: it isn’t being used to make our lives better. It’s being used to make someone else richer at our expense.
We need tech that protects us as aggressively as today’s platforms extract from us.
And those builders need funding. 💚
You’ve spent 15 years contributing open source code.
Now, to stay employable, you rent your capability back from companies that trained their models on your work.
Just so you can keep pace.
This week, Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 alongside workflows that can run hundreds of agents in parallel.
They can write, refactor, and debug across entire codebases – because they were trained on ours.
The commons became the input.
The API became the gate.
And the people who laid the foundation are now being forced to subscribe.
We ask Claude to draft apologies before we've internalized what we've done wrong.
We ask ChatGPT to edit our emotions into a response that protects us from being known.
Someone asks us a question, and our first instinct is to ask Gemini to answer for us.
We used to hold human problems in our heads for hours, days, years – but now we offload them in minutes to intelligence that doesn't feel.
It's not that AI is inherently bad, it's that the dependency curve is subtle – and what we're starting to outsource to machines is the intricate work of knowing who we are.
We need to build a different path.
💚
100%. if the incentive model still depends on profiling people to sell ads, it’s privacy theater.
protecting aggressively might look like building tools where extraction's blocked by design. if the architecture can't collect your data, nobody can monetize it.
things like privacy and data sovereignty can’t just be features, they need to be the business model.
AI isn't replacing jobs one at a time, it’s collapsing the apprenticeship layer.
Associate research. Junior design. Baseline code. Entry-level analysis.
The first rungs of entire career ladders are being erased – while politicians package it into campaign language and CEOs translate it into margin.
But people don’t need abstractions after their world's been pulled out from under them.
They need a bridge. 💚
Banks are saying it plainly: adapt, or be replaced as "lower-value human capital."
This is what it looks like when the social contract dissolves.
The response has to be bigger than policy. Regulation alone can’t fix a logic that sees people as diminishing returns.
We need to rebuild the system – so technology serves the public, and people remain the point.
💚