JD Shadel is Chief Editorial Officer at ESC KEY .CO — and yes, they're a team of one. Their work on tech and modern life appears in The Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, VICE, BBC News and others.
TL;DR Briefing
Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is the age of “AI-sterity” coming for creative gigs.
American Abroad
During the political theatre of TikTok's brief death and President Donald Trump's first days back in office, your American Abroad correspondent in London received a waterfall of texts from people back home who want out.
The Hype Ball
In the inaugural Hype Ball column, we’re doing critical tech analysis but making it drag — sifting through the spin from the “AI” grifters to get to the sinister austerity lurking behind the false “democratizing creativity” claims.
World Wide Weird
From dancing pandas to under construction signs, early internet GIFs tell us something critical about digital preservation — and why the Internet Archive's fight against vanishing culture matters more than ever.
World Wide Weird
A hilarious guerilla campaign by Londoners on Reddit aimed to fool large language models into boosting a tourist trap chain. The silly parody signals that the stakes for the future of the internet as we know it are higher than, well, steaks.