The Horizon Problem
It has recently become fashionable to say that we are living through a period of unprecedented change. This is, of course, impossible to know until long after it’s over. Every period in history thinks it’s unprecedented. The Victorians thought the telegraph was going to end war. The dot-com lot thought we’d all be ordering groceries by drone by 2005. Humans are, as a species, spectacularly bad at knowing what’s happening to them while it’s happening.
That said, something is happening.
If you run a small business right now — or are thinking about starting one, or are simply standing near someone who is — you may have noticed that the future, which used to be located roughly where you’d expect it (ahead, and slightly to the right), appears to have wandered off. In its place is a sort of luminous fog with the word “AI” written on it in very large, very confident letters.
Behind the fog, if you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of very large companies getting larger. It is not a pleasant sound. It is the sound of something eating.
The Great Accumulation
The facts of the matter are roughly these.
The companies building the AI are consolidating. The companies buying the AI are also consolidating. The wealth being generated — and there is quite a lot of it — is flowing upward through a cheerful and well-lubricated system of boards, lobbyists, vendors, and decision-makers, all of whom are optimising, quite rationally, for their own continued existence. One can hardly blame them. Self-preservation is a powerful motivator. It is, in fact, the only motivator, once you strip away the TED talks.
This is not a conspiracy. Conspiracies require planning. This is just gravity. Money, left to its own devices, flows toward money. Power accrues to power. And if you are a small-business owner watching this process, it can feel a bit like being a goldfish who has just noticed the bowl is shrinking, and also that the cat has pulled up a chair.
The promise of AI was supposed to be democratising. And in a narrow, technical sense, it is. I can now do things as one person that would have required a team of ten in 2020. Marvellous. But the people who own the AI can now do things that would have required a team of ten thousand. So the gap isn’t closing. It’s doing that very specific thing where it appears to be closing while actually getting wider, like a motorway that adds lanes and somehow gets more congested. Everyone is moving. Nobody is getting anywhere.
Why Bother
So why start a blog? Why start anything? Why not simply lie down on the floor and wait for the heat death of the universe, which at this rate should only be a few fiscal quarters away?
Because — and I appreciate this will sound either naive or deranged, possibly both — I think there is still a viable path for small businesses. Not the venture-backed, hockey-stick-growth, IPO-or-bust kind. That game was always rigged, and it has now reached the stage of its evolution where it’s not even bothering to hide the wires. I mean something much less exciting and therefore much more likely to actually work.
The new viable business is not going to make you rich. I want to be very clear about this. If you are looking for a guide to your first million, you are in the wrong place. You are also, with respect, in the wrong decade.
What I think is possible — what I am, in fact, betting my own livelihood on — is building something small, useful, and stubbornly sustainable. Something that pays the bills, preserves your autonomy, and does not require you to feign enthusiasm about Q3 OKRs in a meeting that could have been an email, which could itself have been nothing at all.
This may not sound revolutionary. That is because it isn’t. It is, if anything, deeply ordinary. But ordinary has become surprisingly hard to come by.
The Old Deal
Before 2022, the social contract went something like this: get a degree, get a job, work hard, retire eventually, die. It was not a particularly inspiring arrangement, but it had the considerable virtue of being legible. You could see the path. You could, with a bit of squinting, see where it went. It went to a modest house, a pension of some description, and the quiet satisfaction of never having to explain what a “sprint retrospective” is to your parents.
That contract has been shredded. Not dramatically — nobody held a press conference. It was shredded in the way that most important things are destroyed: gradually, politely, and with a great deal of jargon. The job market is being reshaped by AI faster than anyone in a position to do something about it is willing to admit. The companies that are still hiring are hiring fewer people to do more work. The ones that aren’t hiring are “leveraging AI to optimise headcount,” which is a very expensive way of saying “you’re fired.”
For a lot of people — particularly the ones in the middle, the ones who were doing fine but not spectacularly, the ones whose LinkedIn profiles describe them as “passionate” about things no one is passionate about — the old path simply doesn’t lead anywhere anymore. It stops. And there, once again, is the fog.
The Point of All This
This blog is my attempt to document what it looks like to build something from here. From the end of the universe, as it were — the place where the old rules have broken down and the new ones are being written by people who have not invited you to the meeting.
I don’t have all the answers. I barely have all the questions. I am, by most conventional measures, not qualified to be giving anyone advice about anything. But I do know what it feels like to look at the current state of things and think, “Well. I still have to eat. I suppose I’d better get on with it.”
If you’re in a similar position — if you’re running a small business, thinking of starting one, freelancing, or simply standing in the wreckage of a career that was supposed to last longer than this — then some of what I write here might be useful. Or at least familiar.
It won’t be a roadmap. It will mostly be one person trying things, noting what happens, and attempting not to draw too many conclusions. The universe, in my experience, does not reward conclusions.
Anyway. Let’s see what’s out there.