The Right to Be Wrong.
On following threads, gotcha culture, and the slow collective lobotomy.
Someone shared a poem with me this weekend. It’s about me - or at least, aimed at me. The language is lifted directly from LinkedIn posts I’ve made. The history it digs up is mine.
Beware the pushers of Gen AI. They have too many folk to please. It doesn’t take long, to do a search and a song, and discover their old love of NFTs.
Beware the pushers of Gen AI. They don’t have much left you see. Go back a few years through the muck and the tears, and you’ll find them saying the same about Web3.
Beware the pushers of Gen AI. ‘You’re a luddite..’ they’ll call you, ‘...or a liar’ they’ll curse. It was only 2023, when they told you and me that by now we’d all be living in the metaverse.
Beware the pushers of Gen AI. You are smarter than you think. Finding an average, uncovering the mean. it’s the fastest way to get to beige - not pink.
Beware the pushers of Gen AI. They know not what they do. Creativity you see, it kind of matters to me. And I think it should matter to you.
It’s a good poem, actually. Punchy, rhythmic. I can appreciate the craft even when I’m the target.
And pushback comes with the territory - having a profile, writing publicly, taking positions on things that are still unfolding, messy, uncertain. Some people love what you have to say. Some people hate it - and start hating you, regardless of whether they actually know you. Is it shit? Yes. But it is what it is.
Normally I wouldn’t address something like this. Though it does hurt - it’s hard to grow a thick skin, to have stones thrown and be okay with it. You’re only human. But I sat with this one for a while, because it’s poking at two things I think deserve more than a snarky poem. Two things that get flattened by the gotcha, and I’d rather add some nuance and depth.
The first is the right to be wrong. To fuck it up - in small ways, in spectacular ways - and still be allowed to keep going. Keep thinking. Keep refining.
The second is about threads. How ideas actually evolve - how the questions underneath can survive even when their packaging crashes and burns. Being wrong about a framing isn't the same as being wrong about what you were reaching for.
The poem flattens both. So let me unflatten them.
I've been pulling at the same threads for years. Obsessively, probably.
Who gets to create, and who gets to own what they create? Who captures the value when communities build something together? What happens when participation matters more than passive consumption? Who controls the infrastructure - and what happens to everyone else when they do?
When I wrote about fandom, I was asking these questions. Fan communities had figured out something about belonging, participation, collective meaning-making - and I thought it was a glimpse of where culture was heading. I wrote about it a lot: Decoding Community, The Multiplayer Brand, The Fandom Industrial Complex, others. People thought it was a bit silly. Not serious strategy. Now every brand wants “community” and fandom mechanics are everywhere. The questions I was asking just became obvious.
When I got excited about NFTs, I was asking these questions. Not the apes. (God, never the apes.) The thing underneath. A mechanism that might let creators actually own their work. Portable identity. Transparent value flows. The idea that the internet might not have to be a place where platforms capture everything and creators get scraped.
The packaging was a disaster. The speculation drowned the signal. The grifters arrived and stripped whatever was interesting for parts.
But the questions didn’t go away. They’re sitting at the centre of every AI debate right now - training data, consent, compensation, who owns what. Look at what Metalabel is building: Yancey Strickler, the Kickstarter co-founder, has made a platform for collaborative creation with automatic transparent revenue splits. Shared treasuries. The ability to take your creative output with you.
“We’re building with these primitives,” Strickler wrote, “because it’s hard for us to see why we would make a web product that wouldn’t share value with the people who create it.”
That’s the NFT thesis. Without the casino. Without the shit art and naff profile pictures. The questions found a home that actually works.
When I got interested in the metaverse, I was still asking these questions, reading a lot of what Matthew Ball put out into the world - his definition was precise: a massively scaled, interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds, experienced synchronously by unlimited users with persistence of data. A successor to the internet.
Most people heard ‘3D virtual worlds’ and stopped there. But the part that hooked me was what had to exist underneath for any of it to work. Interoperability - your identity, your data, your assets moving with you instead of being locked in whoever’s walled garden captured you first. The idea that the default mode of the internet - every platform a roach motel, easy to check in, impossible to leave with your stuff - might actually change.
That was the magic. Not the goggles. Not the virtual offices.
Then Facebook rebranded as Meta - colonising the term entirely - and torched billions making everyone look like Wii characters in empty conference rooms. Say 'metaverse' in a meeting now and watch the room start dry heaving.
But last month, the Linux Foundation announced the Agentic AI Foundation. Anthropic, OpenAI, Block, Google, Microsoft, Amazon - all collaborating on shared protocols for AI agents. Open standards. Neutral governance.
Block’s statement could have been lifted directly from Ball’s writing: “We hope that the AAIF can become what the W3C is for the Web: a set of standards and protocols that guarantee interoperability, open access, and freedom of choice.”
That’s the metaverse thesis. The real one. Now being built for AI.
The word became radioactive. The question found somewhere else to go.
This is how it works. This is how it always works.
Pets.com. Late 90’s. Sock puppet, spectacular flameout, punchline for two decades. But the question - can you sell pet supplies online? - was boringly correct. Chewy sold for $3.35 billion 15 years later.
Napster was sued into oblivion and dead within two years. Yet it proved a demand the music industry spent ten years pretending wasn’t real. Spotify built an empire on the same insight.
The dot-com crash left behind thousands of miles of fiber optic cable nobody knew what to do with. The bubble was stupid. But the cables are still carrying your data today.
Packaging fails. Questions survive. They find new homes.
We’re terrible at seeing this in real time. When something crashes, we assume the whole thing was wrong, dumb, a waste of time. We don't separate the implementation from the question. We don't notice when it resurfaces somewhere else, rebuilt by people who learned from what didn't work the first time around.
I got the framing wrong on NFTs. I got the framing wrong on the metaverse. My receipts are right there - the poet found them easily enough. But I don't think I was wrong about the questions - I'm still following them.
And today, they’re everywhere. The AI training data debates are ownership questions. The fights over creator compensation are value flow questions. Story Protocol is building open IP infrastructure. Farcaster is trying to make social identity portable. Metalabel is what NFTs should have been. Creative Commons is exploring new ways to handle copyright and ownership for virtual IP. Agentic AI is mostly smoke and mirrors right now, but the questions it’s raising - security, privacy, data ownership, portability - are the interoperability questions all over again. The AAIF is the metaverse thesis rebuilt for a different substrate.
New models for collective ownership, shared treasuries, participation that actually pays - they’re emerging in corners most people aren’t watching yet.
That's why I'm still fascinated. The lens was slightly off - a lot of us got that wrong at the time. But the questions themselves, I stand by them.
The internet has spent a decade learning to punish public exploration. You said something in 2021? Here it is in 2025, stripped of context, served up as prosecution. You were excited about something that didn’t pan out? Grifter. You changed your mind when evidence changed? Flip-flopper. You hold two competing ideas at once? Hypocrite. You explored with genuine curiosity that turned out to be misplaced? Shill. Sellout. Permanently tainted.
Pick a lane. Stay in it. Fucking die there.
I’ve done this too. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’ve dunked on people. I’ve screenshot-quoted someone’s bad take and enjoyed the little rush of being right. It feels good in the moment. Righteous, even. I’m ashamed of most of it now.
We got good at the gotcha. So good that somewhere along the way we stopped being able to tell the difference between someone acting in bad faith and someone just getting it wrong.
There are grifters. Of course there are. People who know they’re selling smoke, who follow the money from trend to trend with no thread connecting any of it. When the music stops, they’re already at the next party, unbothered by whatever they left behind. (We’ve all sat in meetings with them. Watched them pivot without flinching.) They deserve the scrutiny.
But someone exploring in public looks different. They follow questions that genuinely interest them. They get excited - sometimes too excited. They're not prophets - they're just curious, trying to make sense of things before the dust settles. And curious people get it wrong sometimes.
The difference is the intellectual continuity. The attempt to figure something out rather than to sell you something.
If we can’t tell these two things apart, we’re in trouble. We might already be.
I get DMs. A lot of them. From people who have interesting things to say but won’t say them publicly. People with half-formed ideas, genuine questions, uncertain positions they’d like to think through out loud. But they’ve watched what happens when you do that. They’ve seen the gotchas, the screenshots, the way a single bad call becomes a permanent exhibit.
Do you know how much we lose because of this? How many interesting ideas sitting in drafts folders, unsent, because someone did the maths and decided it wasn't worth the risk?
The gotcha crowd thinks they’re holding people accountable. They’re not. They’re making it safer to say nothing, try nothing, risk nothing. They’re building a world where the only voices left are the ones who never meant it in the first place.
That’s the irony that kills me. The screenshot-and-destroy approach doesn’t weed out the grifters. The grifters don’t give a shit - they’ve got no reputation to protect because they were never building one. Just extracting and moving on. The people who retreat are the ones who actually meant it. The ones who might have updated, refined, gotten closer to something true.
The shameless survive. Everyone else goes quiet. And the discourse gets exactly as stupid as you’d expect.
Call it accountability if you want. I call it a slow, collective lobotomy.
Which brings me back to where I started. Threads and the right to be wrong aren't two separate things. They're the same thing. Every interesting question lives in uncertain territory - that's what makes it interesting. If you wait until you're sure, you're not exploring. You're just narrating what's already obvious.
And for the record - I’m not a ‘Gen AI pusher.’ I work in the space, yes. I find the questions fascinating. I’ve also written extensively about the dangers - concentration of power, training data scraped without consent, environmental costs that never make the keynote, the geopolitics of all of it. On Inevitability. The Networked World Order. I hold excitement and concern in the same hand, because that’s the only honest position available right now.
But nuance doesn’t fit in a poem. Doesn’t fit in a screenshot. So the story gets flattened: trend-chaser, grifter, pusher. Whatever’s easiest.
I got things wrong. I’ll get things wrong again. That’s not a flaw in the process. That is the process. So I’ll keep sharing my thinking anyway - in public, receipts piling up. Challenge the ideas. Push back on the thinking. Point out the blind spots. That’s what this is for. That's why I do it out loud.
But the gotcha, the snark, the permanent record that traps people at their wrongest moment - that just makes the silence grow. And silence never figured anything out.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got threads to follow.
Social media has flattened all nuance. It's either right or wrong, good or bad, smart or stupid. But that binary doesn't work for humans - we are inherently messy, complex and multi-faceted.
I don’t mind pushback when I post. I actually encourage it. Friction is how my ideas and arguments get refined and stronger. What I do find concerning as you allude to in our society is the erosion of nuance, the dichotomy of ideologies and the growing inability to update opinions when presented with data and facts. Debate used to be about refinement, now I find it’s often about defence and encouraging applause from the echo chamber. When opinions can’t adapt to evidence, data or fact that’s when it’s not real thought leaderships, it’s just a performance.