“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a
collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir LeninIn 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of
its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which
means truth in Russian.“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us.
We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big
technological shift.” — Fidji Simo, 2026Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, explained this to OpenAI staff
as to why OpenAI had just bought TBPN. Different century.
Same logic to explain an emerging new socioeconomic order, a new
post-revolution reality.
A confident company doesn’t need to blow $150 million on a YouTube show just to keep the press coverage positive.
Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only update at Stratechery:
At the same time, I’ve previously wondered if OpenAI might be like
Twitter, another text-centric company that fell backwards into a
huge market and never developed into a functional business because
of it; if Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine,
OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow. There’s
supposed to be a pot of gold there, but it never quite seems to
materialize, the colors are fading, and worst of all there just
isn’t much evidence that anyone knows what they are doing or that
there is any sort of overarching plan. Ads are bad, until they’re
the plan; Meta execs are hired en masse, and the ads that launch
are low-effort keyword-driven offerings; Apple is a partner until
Jony Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari;
meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on the enterprise and shipping,
Google is encroaching, and the answer to that is to buy a podcast?
What is going on here?
