The scale is historic. The result may be the largest popular-vote win for either party since 1976. Not since 2006 has the minority party taken both chambers on one night. Democrats pushed deep into the heart of MAGA country, far beyond anything they managed in 2018. Forty-three per cent of voters told NBC’s exit poll that opposing Trump was one reason for their vote. When a man makes an election about himself, he really shouldn’t be surprised when it is.

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Then there is Texas, the state Republicans regarded as the political equivalent of the Bank of England’s gold vault. Democrat Gina Hinojosa unseated Greg Abbott to become Texas’s first Democratic governor since 1995. James Talarico won the Senate race. Nathan Johnson captured the attorney general’s office, just to rub it in. Abbott had beaten his last three opponents by double digits. This time he trailed by around 14 points when the race was called. The Alamo has seen less comprehensive defeats.

Trump’s loyalty to his allies proved as durable as a paper umbrella. On polling day itself, he hailed Abbott as “strong and highly respected”. Within hours of Abbott’s concession, Trump was on Truth Social explaining that the governor had lost because he became a “RINO” in the last six months of his political life. That is roughly the shelf life of an endorsement from the President: shorter than a pint of milk, and considerably more likely to curdle.

In fairness to Trump, Abbott had seen this coming. Last month he skipped the President’s San Antonio rally, claiming he was too busy. He was right: he was busy losing.

But the comic jewel of the Lone Star State is Ken Paxton. In the primary, he christened his Democratic opponent “Tofu Talarico”, along with “Low-T Talarico” and other playground classics. On Tuesday, the bean curd won. Paxton once called Trump’s endorsement the most powerful force in politics. Texan voters appear to have identified a more powerful one: Texan voters.

Much of this damage was home-made. In a number of these states, Trump personally picked the nominees, sometimes over the objections of Republicans who warned they would be weak in a general election. Once again the President assembled his own catastrophe from the kit, ignored the instructions and blamed the Allen key.

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Which brings us to the $5,000 question. Back in September, Trump promised every adult a “Trump Dividend”, but only if Republicans won both chambers. The bill would have come to about $1.2 trillion, and he never had the power to pay it without Congress anyway. Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno had promised a bill to pass it immediately after 3 November. He will now need a bill to explain where it went.

Republicans have their defence. Speaker Mike Johnson argued that holding the House would have meant defying more than a century of midterm history, and he has a point. Presidents almost always get kicked in midterms, and Democrats needed to flip only a net three seats. But history does not usually hand Kansas, South Carolina and the governorship of Texas to the other side. That is not a historical trend. It is a telegram.

What now? Trump has vowed to veto anything Democrats send him, and Democrats have vowed aggressive oversight of his family’s business dealings and his White House renovations. The new Senate can block his nominees, Supreme Court picks included. Chuck Schumer promised voters that “relief is on the way”. Realistically, with a veto pen waiting in the Oval Office, Democrats’ affordability agenda may end up as a 2028 campaign brochure rather than actual relief. Two years of trench warfare beckon, with the ballroom renovation as no man’s land.

Britain, meanwhile, watches with a knowing smirk. Labour faced the same cost-of-living fury, Reform led nearly every poll for more than a year, and the party quietly removed the unpopular Keir Starmer and installed Andy Burnham. Within a week, Labour had caught or overtaken Reform in the polls. The British method is cold-blooded and unsentimental: sack your leader before the voters sack your party. Republicans never had that option. Their leader was the party, so voters dismissed the lot.

The American constitution wisely allows no such Westminster-style knifing, so the President serves out his term. He has two years, a veto pen and a hostile Congress, and on Tuesday he lost a vote on himself. America’s lamest duck now quacks alone.

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It’s a one-way missile mayhem...

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Strictly and its American counterpart, Dancing with the Stars, offer a surprisingly useful way to understand how we encounter public figures. There is the performance itself, and then everything through which we interpret it: rehearsals, interviews, backstage exchanges, personal posts and other people explaining what we ought to think. The dance still matters, but by the time it happens, we may already have chosen our side.

Previously, on the programme you haven’t watched

There was never an innocent age when everyone watched the same programme, reached an independent conclusion and discussed it calmly over a modest biscuit. Television had editors, newspapers had favourites and families had someone who talked through the judging. Strictly has long understood the value of the surrounding story. It Takes Two gives viewers interviews, rehearsals and the opportunity to become unusually knowledgeable about someone else’s hamstrings.

Social media expands both the ways into that story and the number of people telling it. You might follow a professional dancer, encounter a contestant’s personal account or stumble across a partnership through an enthusiastic stranger’s compilation video. By Saturday, one viewer has absorbed a week of perseverance and progress. Another has seen an awkward exchange and three separate explanations of why the partnership is doomed. They watch the same ninety-second routine carrying quite different expectations.

Politics offers a less sparkly version of this experience. A speech or interview becomes a collection of clips, each finding its own audience. One person encounters a thoughtful explanation; another sees a hesitation; a third receives the same hesitation with ominous music underneath it. All three may reasonably believe they have seen what happened.

Authentic footage, incomplete picture

None of this requires fabrication. Someone may genuinely have rolled their eyes, but what is often missing is the context immediately before it, or a brief flash of irritation is presented as a definitive verdict on character. I remain alert to this risk, unless the clip confirms what I already believe, in which case I treat it as compelling evidence and share it widely.

In a dance competition, enthusiastic overinterpretation is a relatively harmless pleasure. Deciding that a contestant looks “a bit full of themselves” is practically a domestic voting category, even if it rarely appears on the judges’ paddles. In politics, the consequences are rather greater. One strong answer becomes proof of expertise; one clumsy sentence, evidence of permanent incompetence; one agreeable personal moment, a recommendation for high office.

Short clips can also do genuine work. They can surface something a lengthy broadcast overlooked, or make a complex explanation accessible to people who would never sit through the full interview. The question is always what survives the selection. Thirty seconds can tell us something useful, as long as we resist asking it to tell us everything.

I feel I know them. This may be a problem.

Rehearsal footage gives us a reason to care about the person behind the dance. We see the effort, the frustration and the occasional negotiation with feet that appear to have received instructions from an entirely separate department. Understanding what someone has struggled with makes their eventual improvement more satisfying to watch.

Informal political content can make public figures more approachable, but familiarity can grow faster than understanding. A politician who makes a convincing cup of tea has demonstrated precisely one thing: they can make tea. We occasionally ask it to carry a considerable amount of additional constitutional weight.

Being personable tells us little about how someone assesses evidence, manages competing priorities or responds when a decision goes badly wrong. Equally, awkwardness on camera is not a complete policy platform. You can like someone and still expect them to explain their numbers.

The audience has joined the production team

Fans now select moments, produce edits, explain technical details and defend favourites with considerable commitment. Political supporters, critics, journalists and campaign teams compete to explain what we have just watched in a similar ongoing contest over interpretation. This can improve the broader conversation when someone supplies missing context or corrects a claim. It can also turn scrutiny into an exercise in protecting the team at all costs.

Once we have publicly declared a favourite, acknowledging a poor performance becomes socially inconvenient. Friends have been informed. Posts exist. There is almost certainly a group chat. On Strictly, this produces spirited argument about whether the judges understand dancing. In politics, it can make holding anyone to account remarkably difficult.

Someone, of course, still chooses the headline, cuts the clip and decides whether we need the sentence immediately before it. These are small editorial decisions with considerable influence over whether we see a difficult question handled with composure or a person apparently in need of urgent supervision. The fuller account may be available somewhere. But by then we have watched the clip, formed a view and forwarded it to someone with the message “Exactly.”

We can still have favourites, enjoy the backstage humour and consider the scoring an outrage. We should probably check the performance before voting, though. Strictly at least provides a weekly elimination and someone holding a numbered paddle to explain precisely where it went wrong. Democracy makes us wait considerably longer, then sends the unsuccessful contestant to the House of Lords. Even Craig might consider that generous.

This article began with its author’s original idea and was developed, edited, illustrated, published, distributed and promoted with the assistance of LettsNews, with every editorial decision remaining in the hands of its author. It is the LettsNews connected workflow, put into practice.

“Show me the money!”

Or not...

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American democracy is having another expensive nervous breakdown. More than $15 billion has reportedly been raised across the 2026 election cycle, much of it destined for television advertisements explaining that the other half of the country is either communist, fascist or secretly planning to confiscate the family barbecue.

Both parties claim to be fighting for ordinary Americans, although ordinary Americans appear to have been priced out of the fighting. Beneath the familiar spectacle of politicians denouncing wealthy elites between fundraising dinners with wealthy elites, something interesting is happening. The Democrats and Republicans have developed rather different ways of paying for democracy.

Democratic congressional candidates have been remarkably successful at raising money directly, often in small contributions. Republicans have attracted a disproportionate share of America’s largest political donations, much of it flowing through super PACs. The Republicans have the billionaire subscription service. The Democrats have perfected the recurring $25 payment, with an automatic renewal every time civilisation faces imminent collapse.

The question isn’t simply which side has more money. It’s whether the way politicians raise it changes whom they listen to once elected.

The founding fathers forgot the fundraising dinner

The American constitutional experiment was built around a charmingly innocent proposition: citizens would elect representatives who would answer to them, rather than to a monarch, an aristocracy or whichever duke owned the surrounding countryside. Admittedly, the original definition of citizen was rather selective, but representative accountability was the general idea.

The founders anticipated factions, ambition and corruption. They did not anticipate a political system in which a billionaire living three thousand miles away could spend more electing a congressman than the congressman’s entire constituency.

Consider two candidates. One raises money from thousands of local voters, each contributing what they can. The other depends heavily on a national super PAC financed by someone who owns three aircraft and regards corporate taxation as a personal insult.

Both need votes. But the first has an incentive to cultivate relationships with the people they hope to represent. The second has an additional constituency whose interests may require a private terminal.

Of course, the distinction is imperfect. Small donors are not necessarily local, and a $25 contribution confers no greater right to representation than giving nothing. Nevertheless, a politician supported by a broad constituency has a different financial relationship from one whose electoral survival depends on a few spectacularly wealthy strangers.

The Constitution gave citizens the vote. It neglected to provide everyone with a seat at the fundraising dinner.

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The peasants’ revolt, sponsored by billionaires

October reporting shows America’s largest political donors directing vastly more money towards Republican-aligned causes than Democratic ones. Elon Musk alone has reportedly contributed hundreds of millions during the cycle.

This is a remarkable collection of benefactors for a movement dedicated to liberating ordinary Americans from powerful elites. It is rather like discovering that the French Revolution was underwritten by the Palace of Versailles, with complimentary champagne for major donors.

Republicans certainly have grassroots supporters, and Donald Trump has demonstrated an exceptional ability to persuade them to donate. But enthusiasm for Trump doesn’t necessarily extend to an unfamiliar Senate candidate whose principal achievement is having been photographed standing near him.

Fortunately, the billionaires can help. Persuading a million people to contribute $50 requires considerable effort. Persuading five billionaires to contribute $10 million each requires five telephone calls and perhaps lunch somewhere that doesn’t print prices on the menu.

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Super PACs can spend unlimited sums independently supporting or opposing candidates. The legal distinction is important. The billionaire doesn’t give the candidate the money. He simply finances millions of dollars of advertising explaining why the candidate’s opponent is a danger to civilisation. Entirely separate activities, rather like a restaurant insisting it has no relationship with the chef.

This need not involve corruption. The problem is more elegant than that. A donor contributing $25 receives an automated thank-you email and six requests for another $25. Someone contributing $25 million is unlikely to spend much time on hold.

What does the ordinary American get?

The real test of this arrangement is what happens when the interests of wealthy donors and ordinary voters diverge.

Lower business taxes can encourage investment. Less regulation may help smaller businesses. Tariffs can appeal to workers worried about industrial decline, even when economists and importers are reaching simultaneously for the aspirin.

But wealthy investors have obvious reasons to favour lower taxes on high incomes, capital and estates. Lower-income voters are more immediately concerned with wages, housing, groceries and healthcare. The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the Republicans’ major 2025 tax and spending legislation found that households towards the bottom of the income distribution would generally lose resources over subsequent years, while those in the middle and at the top would gain.

For a billionaire, Medicaid cuts may represent admirable fiscal discipline. For someone whose mother depends on the programme, fiscal discipline may involve explaining why the invisible hand of the market is no longer paying for her medication.

Technology investors have equally strong opinions about cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and regulation. They argue that government interference stifles innovation, an argument that becomes particularly persuasive when the innovation belongs to them. The warehouse worker whose job is being automated may have a less enthusiastic interpretation of progress.

Democrats have their own uncomfortable relationships. Wall Street donors favour financial policies that don’t necessarily match the priorities of progressive voters. Wealthy technology supporters may enthusiastically fund politicians promising to protect workers from corporate power, provided the protection doesn’t become too enthusiastic. Environmental donors and union members can find themselves on opposite sides of an energy project, each convinced the party ought to remember who its friends are.

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Neither party is a single political interest. Both are collections of competing constituencies, some considerably better funded than others. The question is whose concerns receive the most attention when they collide.

The billionaire and the warehouse worker may vote for the same candidate. They are unlikely to have identical expectations of what happens afterwards.

The Democrats’ $25 emergency

Before Democrats begin awarding themselves medals for democratic virtue, they should examine their own fundraising machinery.

Michael Bloomberg and George Soros are not financing elections with the proceeds of a church raffle. Democratic super PACs receive enormous contributions, and Democratic politicians have wealthy patrons whose policy preferences are unlikely to be expressed solely through handwritten letters to their congressman.

But Democrats have also industrialised small-donor fundraising with an efficiency that would impress a subscription software company. Every election is the most important in history. Every deadline is final. Every email arrives with the solemn urgency of a hostage negotiation, although the hostage is usually a campaign finance target.

The achievement is real. Raising millions through small contributions can bring more people into political activity, create direct relationships with candidates and reduce dependence on a few enormous benefactors. It can also turn democratic participation into a recurring billing arrangement in which the customer receives anxiety instead of a streaming service.

And those small donors aren’t necessarily representative of the wider electorate. The people most willing to give money online are often the most politically committed. A candidate can become highly responsive to a national audience of furious subscribers while remaining surprisingly unfamiliar with the quieter voters back home.

The Democrats have developed a formidable method of collecting small sums from large numbers of people. The Republicans have formidable access to large sums from small numbers of people. Both methods are efficient. Neither guarantees that the resulting politician will remember the constituent who couldn’t afford to donate.

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One person, one vote, several billion dollars

America has perfected a curious form of political equality. Every citizen gets one vote, while a fortunate minority can spend enough money to influence what millions of other citizens think before casting theirs.

The Republicans have made the contradiction particularly visible by combining populist rhetoric with extraordinary billionaire support. The Democrats have demonstrated that a vast number of relatively small donations can also finance an enormous political machine. One model concentrates financial influence. The other distributes fundraising across more contributors, although it can still concentrate political attention on the people most willing to pay.

Perhaps the billionaires sincerely believe they are acting in the public interest. Perhaps the small donors do too. The trouble begins when their interests diverge from those of the millions of Americans who elect representatives but never contribute a penny.

The Constitution says politicians represent the people. The campaign finance system has added a rather elaborate footnote.

The billionaires buy the politicians. The small donors rent their attention by monthly instalment. And ordinary Americans get to choose which ones they’ve bought.

Superstitious Westminster has noticed an unfortunate symmetry. Half a century ago, a chancellor named Healey took Britain cap in hand to the IMF. Today’s market jokers note that another Healey is preparing a Budget, and some argue the fiscal outlook is grimmer than the one Denis faced in 1976. John is no relation, but try telling that to a gilt trader at 7am.

The numbers are the stuff of horror films. The fiscal buffer stood at £23.6bn in March. Pantheon Macroeconomics now reckons it is nearer £13bn, and says the Chancellor needs £11bn a year in tax rises or cuts just to rebuild the cushion. The FT’s pundits think it could be as little as £5–10bn. Every quarter-point rise in gilt yields adds about £2.5bn a year to debt interest. Mr Healey is essentially trying to fill a bath with the plug out while the bond market adds more plugholes.

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Into this inferno strides Andy Burnham with a pumpkin-sized idea. He told Labour’s conference that the state pension triple lock will be replaced by a cheaper double lock from April 2030, to help fund a National Care Service. The courage is breathtaking. He has taken on the demographic that owns the houses, turns out at every election and has the free time to write letters to local papers in green ink.

The timing is pure pantomime. The triple lock stays until 2030, so pensioners get a rise of at least 3.9 per cent next April. That will push the state pension above the personal tax threshold for the first time. The pension will be so generous that HMRC will have to take some of it back. Meanwhile, Burnham has admitted a “shortfall” in the plans to pay for the care service the change is supposed to fund. A reform that starts in four years, for a service whose sums don’t add up yet, is trick-or-treating in reverse: knock on the door, hand over an IOU, run away.

Homeowners are not laughing either. Investors are pricing in a Bank of England rate rise in November, another in February and a third by June. Anyone remortgaging this winter will find the bond market has carved something on their doorstep too.

Inevitably, the dread word “Truss” is back. One wealth boss warned that the UK could be “Truss’d” as yields surge. Calmer heads note that 2022’s crisis came from a seizure in pension funds’ LDI strategies, not simply high yields. The lettuce stays in the fridge, for now.

So where will Healey find the money? Rumour has it he is summoning the bosses of Britain’s biggest banks to a pre-Budget summit. Inviting bankers to a meeting ahead of an announcement about taxes is the City equivalent of the vet asking your dog to hop in the car after breaking its leg.

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To be balanced, Burnham’s defenders have a case. The triple lock costs £10bn a year, and the FT’s own editorial board has argued it is time to scrap it, so ditching it is hardly radical. Burnham, meanwhile, is the only politician tested with a positive net approval rating, at +14. Critics counter that pensioners are about to face another surge in household energy prices, and that promising cuts in 2030 does nothing to calm markets in 2026.

The Budget is two weeks away. Either Healey pulls a rabbit out of a hat, or the bond market pulls the hat off Healey. Halloween follows three days later, and the scariest costume in Britain this year will be a man in a sensible suit holding a red box.

The Letts Journal is a reader-supported publication and not a pollster. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Both get the same content so you can keep it cheap.

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Traditionally, a journalist researched a story. They wrote it. An editor argued with them about the third paragraph, and they were probably right. The piece was published. People visited the place where it lived, read it there, and went about their day. Attention and geography were the same. The whole thing was simple, the process tidy. It might even be profitable. Today, the journalist does all of the same things. The editor is still right about the third paragraph. The piece is published. And then people start consuming the journalism everywhere except where it was published.

It gets summarised by an AI assistant responding to someone’s vaguely related question at half eleven on a Tuesday. Three newsletters quote it, two of which fail to link back to it. Someone screenshots it and posts it to a platform where the comments section immediately turns into a slanging match that has little to do with the original piece. A podcast mentions it in passing. A sub-Reddit thread dissects its findings in considerable depth without once naming the publication that produced them. Thousands of people encounter the idea, but rather fewer encounter the article. Almost none reach the publisher’s homepage, the subscription offer in the sidebar, or the editor’s letter that took forty-five minutes to write.

The Philosophical Problem Nobody Asked For

This raises a question that is either fascinating or maddening depending on your disposition and your advertising revenue: if a piece of journalism informs thousands of people, changes minds, sparks conversations and gets quoted extensively, but relatively few people actually visit the site where it was published, was it successful?

Journalism’s traditional answer to this question involved the word “reach,” which was comfortably vague enough to cover most situations. But AI has changed what reach can mean. It no longer means helping people find journalism; it can read it, summarise it and deliver its substance without requiring the reader to visit the original article. Suddenly, the return journey home is optional, and the original question has grown teeth.

Before anyone reaches for the emergency pessimism button, though, a note of balance is in order. Publisher websites are not becoming ghost towns. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that around 57% of people still access news directly through publishers’ websites or apps. It is not a dying model. The majority of news consumers are still making a deliberate, active choice to go somewhere specific for their journalism. Direct relationships, trusted brands and paid subscriptions remain not just viable but genuinely important.

Two Worlds, One Very Confused Business Model

So the old model has not disappeared. It has simply acquired a rather strange new bedfellow. Two different ways of consuming journalism now coexist, occasionally bumping into each other at parties and pretending not to be alarmed.

The first model is direct and intentional. Readers choose publications they trust, visit them regularly, pay for access, and form something resembling a relationship with the journalism they consume. This is the model that sustains newsrooms, funds investigations, and keeps editors employed to be right about third paragraphs.

The second model is distributed and borderless. The substance of the journalism moves through search, social platforms, AI, aggregators and newsletters, reaching people who never went looking for it at a specific address. The ideas travel. The byline may or may not make the journey.

For independent journalists and specialist creators, this distributed model contains an opportunity. For most of journalism’s history, distribution power belonged to whoever owned the printing press, the broadcast licence or the enormous digital audience. If you did not have a large publication or an established audience behind you, your reach was often limited to the people who already knew where to find you. AI discovery and new aggregation mechanisms do not care about size in quite the same way. A genuinely distinctive voice or a piece of rare expertise can now reach far beyond the audience that might once have found it.

The Bit Where the Money Goes Missing

There is, however, an economic problem sitting at the centre of all this like an uninvited guest who has finished the biscuits. Journalism can now travel further while increasingly detached from the people and organisations that paid to produce it. Attention, attribution and economic value have started going to separate destinations This was not how the journey was supposed to work.

This is where infrastructure starts to matter, not as a technical solution but as a way of keeping original work, authorship and source connected as content moves across an increasingly fragmented landscape. Platforms like LettsNews are built around exactly this problem: helping independent journalists and creators distribute original work across multiple destinations without losing the thread back to where it came from and who made it.

What Journalism Actually Needs to Protect

The answer to all of this is not simply “more traffic.” Traffic is a measurement, not a relationship. What journalism needs to preserve urgently, practically and without too much further philosophical hand-wringing, is the connection between original work, authorship, trust and value.

Ideas can travel. Attribution must travel with them. The article left the building. It would be rather nice if it remembered its home address.

This article began with its author’s original idea and was developed, edited, illustrated, published, distributed and promoted with the assistance of LettsNews, with every editorial decision remaining in the hands of its author. It is the LettsNews connected workflow, put into practice.

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So, as a public service, because somebody has to, LettsCartoon presents the 2026 Election Survival Guide. Three rules. That’s it. Even a politician can count to three..?

Rule One: Don’t Hold An Election When Your Inflation Is Like a SpaceX Rocket (One that Works)

Sounds obvious. And yet. Spain did it. Brazil nearly did it. America absolutely did it and then acted surprised. Here’s the thing: voters don’t care about your vision when they can’t afford their weekly shop. They care about eggs. Always eggs. Fix the eggs, win the election. It’s not complicated. Maybe give everyone a chicken for Halloween (just not to eat)?

If your GDP is doing the limbo and inflation is through the roof, perhaps - just perhaps - push the election back six months (we might be tempting fate here...). Redecorate the office. Learn macramé. Anything.

Rule Two: Don’t Jack Up Petrol Prices Before A Winter Election

Nothing radicalises a middle-aged man faster than pulling into a petrol station in October and watching the pump tick past £90. He will vote. He will vote furiously. And he will tell everyone at the golf club - assuming he doesn’t need a second mortgage to get there..

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Winter elections are already a gamble. Cold, dark, miserable - much like the incumbents themselves. Adding a heating crisis to the mix is the political equivalent of turning up to a job interview in an orange jumpsuit. Bold, but inadvisable.

Rule Three: Avoid Crooks, Cartels, Tyrants, And Dodgy Sports Folk

This one feels like it shouldn’t need saying. And yet here we are, watching world leaders photographed beside individuals who make Tony Soprano look like a Neighbourhood Watch coordinator. The rule is simple: if your new best friend has a nickname, an entourage, and a suspicious number of offshore accounts - don’t stand next to them at a press conference.

Dodgy sports folk deserve a special mention. Nothing says “I’ve completely lost the plot” like being papped court- or stadium-side with a billionaire whose money trail reads like a geopolitical thriller. Voters notice. Voters remember. Voters have smartphones.

There you have it. Three rules. And three countries (one Latino, one with eviction issues, and one with Donald Trump) heading into the maelstrom at full tilt. Hang on to your season ticket (unless it’s Manchester City’s).

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

For several thousand years, humanity has been attempting to remove human beings from anything tedious. We invented writing because memory was unreliable, spreadsheets because arithmetic was exhausting, SatNav because nobody wanted to admit they had missed the turning, and management consultants because apparently PowerPoint required a priesthood. Artificial intelligence is merely the latest and most ambitious stage of the project.

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There is, however, a small problem. The machines have become astonishingly good at doing things while we remain inconveniently responsible for deciding which things are worth doing.

AI can research a market, interrogate customer data, construct a financial model and produce enough marketing copy before lunch to make the entire communications department reconsider its mortgage. It can take a founder’s questionable assumption and execute against it with a speed and enthusiasm previously available only from an extremely expensive consultancy.

Which is wonderful, provided the assumption wasn’t idiotic.

The Revenge of the Philosophy Department

One of the more enjoyable developments in artificial intelligence is that some of the world’s most technologically sophisticated companies have discovered they need philosophers.

This is quite a turnaround for a profession whose commercial proposition has traditionally consisted of being asked at dinner parties what exactly one intends to do with a philosophy degree. Anthropic has philosopher Amanda Askell working on the behaviour and character of Claude. Google DeepMind employs Henry Shevlin with the magnificent job title “Philosopher”. Silicon Valley spent decades making fun of the humanities and has now reached the awkward stage where it needs someone who has read them.

The reason is revealing. Engineering can tell us increasingly extraordinary things about what a machine can do. It cannot, by itself, settle what the machine should do. Apparently the word “should” has survived the GPU.

Socrates Saw This Coming, Obviously

Technology panic is considerably older than technology journalism. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts the story of Theuth presenting writing as an invention that would improve wisdom and memory. King Thamus worries that people will instead outsource memory to external marks and acquire the appearance of wisdom without the reality.

It is an excellent story because civilisation’s first recorded complaint about information technology was essentially that it would make everybody stupid. We know this because somebody wrote it down.

Humanity has been repeating the performance ever since. New technologies arrive accompanied by predictions that they will liberate civilisation or destroy it, sometimes from the same people and occasionally in the same podcast.

AI deserves something more useful than either response. It is an extraordinarily capable tool, and the interesting question is what happens when execution becomes abundant while judgement remains stubbornly scarce.

AI Has Invented the High-Speed Mistake

Human judgement is a thoroughly inefficient business. It develops partly because we remember getting things wrong. You price something too cheaply and regret it. You hire the brilliant candidate everyone warned you about. You build the feature customers demanded and discover that apparently none of them meant enough to pay for it. Eventually this collection of embarrassments acquires sufficient density to be renamed “experience”.

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AI doesn’t need the embarrassment.

That is both its strength and its limitation. A model can analyse fifty customer interviews and identify the feature mentioned most often. The founder still has to decide whether frequency means importance. It can produce an immaculate financial forecast, but somebody has to notice that the beautifully formatted assumptions underneath it belong in the fiction department.

The great productivity story around AI is therefore slightly incomplete. We have become very interested in how quickly AI allows us to execute and rather less interested in what happens when the thing being executed is wrong. A founder chooses the wrong customer and AI can now research that customer, develop the positioning, produce the campaign and construct a magnificent forecast showing the glorious future awaiting a business nobody needs.

The machine hasn’t failed. It has performed beautifully. We have simply invented a much faster way of arriving at the wrong answer.

Keep the Human. Lose Some of the Work.

This is why judgement becomes more valuable as AI becomes more capable. When producing the work was difficult and expensive, execution consumed much of the organisation’s attention. As execution becomes cheaper, deciding what deserves to be executed carries more weight.

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That principle sits behind what we’re building at LettsGroup with VentureFactory. AI Co-Founders can do substantial work across a venture, while the founder retains control over the decisions that determine where the company is actually going. The point isn’t to protect founders from AI or preserve pointless human labour as some sort of heritage craft. It is to use machines for the things machines are becoming exceptionally good at without confusing capability with wisdom.

Build with AI while keeping the decisions that matter human. Try VentureFactory at LettsGroup.

There is a surprisingly optimistic conclusion buried underneath all the anxiety about AI. Humans have always built tools that extend what humans can do. AI may turn out to be an unusually powerful one, giving a single founder access to capabilities that once required an organisation behind them. That does not make the founder irrelevant. It makes the quality of the founder’s decisions more consequential.

Perhaps that will be humanity’s slightly humiliating role in the AI economy. The machines will remember more than us, calculate faster than us and produce in seconds what takes us hours. We will still have to look at what they produce, consider the evidence, remember the mistakes, distrust the suspiciously beautiful spreadsheet and ask the oldest and most irritating human question of all: yes, but is this actually a good idea?

And honestly, it tracks.

After years of being told that we are too online, too distracted, too addicted to our phones and probably suffering from some form of attention-span damage, Gen Z has apparently decided that the solution is to buy a notebook.

Not just any notebook, either - a beautiful notebook. Preferably one with a linen cover, expensive paper and the sort of binding that makes you feel as though you have recently inherited a house in the Cotswolds. Then comes the pen, because apparently the wrong biro can ruin your emotional wellbeing, followed by the stickers, the washi tape, the little photographs, the pressed flowers and whatever else is required to turn writing “today was a bit shit” into a 45-minute creative project.

The diary is back.

And, naturally, we have managed to make it a lifestyle aesthetic.

There is something almost impressively circular about the whole thing. We have spent the last fifteen years moving everything from the physical world onto our phones, only to discover that we miss having some things in physical form. We digitised photographs and then bought film cameras. We stopped buying books and then started carrying paperbacks around like personality accessories. We replaced CDs with streaming and then became extremely excited about vinyl. And now, after years of typing our thoughts into Notes apps at 2am, we are rediscovering the humble diary.

The appeal is obvious. There is a particular satisfaction in doing something that cannot ping, refresh, recommend or ask you whether you would like to “continue your journey”. A notebook does not know what you did yesterday, and it certainly does not intend to remind you about it.

But there is one small problem with our analogue rebellion.

We keep posting about it online.

Nothing says “I need to disconnect from the digital world” quite like spending 25 minutes arranging your journal, coffee, candle and carefully selected paperback into a flat lay before filming yourself opening the journal on TikTok.

The irony is almost too perfect.

And yet, perhaps this is why the journaling revival is more interesting than simply another internet trend. The point was never really the notebook. It is the feeling behind it.

We are tired of having every part of our lives fragmented across a collection of apps, platforms, notifications and increasingly aggressive reminders that we have not yet achieved our full potential today. We want somewhere to put our thoughts that does not immediately turn them into data, content or a productivity challenge.

Which raises a slightly awkward question: if what we actually want is a more personal digital life, why are we so convinced the answer has to be going analogue? Perhaps it is finally making digital feel personal again. And maybe that is the sweet spot: not choosing between the notebook and the screen, but finding a way to make the screen feel a little more like your own.

Americans have discovered a thrilling new extreme sport: filling up the car. The national average for regular gasoline climbed to $4.48 a gallon on 21 September, edging towards this year’s record high of $4.56 reached on 21 May. In California, regular now costs $6.114 per gallon, at which point it becomes financially sensible to commute by horse, a vehicle that runs on hay and resentment, both of which Americans have in abundance.

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How did the world’s largest oil producer end up rationing its road trips? Through ambition. Since late February, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the 2026 Iran war has disrupted roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply. Washington then answered the blockade with a blockade of its own, a bit like fixing a leaky pipe by drilling a second hole in it.

The rest of the planet has been invited to the party whether it RSVP’d or not. Brent surged to around $118 in late March, and by early September was back up to $109 as renewed attacks on shipping and energy infrastructure reversed earlier gains. In the Philippines, diesel passed the equivalent of $10.75 a gallon. The only people having a worse time are the Iranians, whose rial hit an all-time low of 2,020,000 to the dollar on 24 August. That makes a cup of tea a seven-figure transaction.

Then there are the tariffs, the economic equivalent of trying to put out a chip-pan fire with a jerrycan. Back in March, the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank not known as a hotbed of Trotskyites, warned the war raised the risk of recession and rising inflation, and urged a rethink of tariff policy and an end to Trump’s relentless attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence. The White House took this advice in the spirit in which it was offered: by ignoring it entirely.

That brings us to the finest comedy of the lot. Trump installed Kevin Warsh at the Fed, presumably expecting a loyal golden retriever. Instead, on 16 September the committee voted unanimously, 12–0, to raise rates to 3.75–4.00 per cent, the first increase since 2023, despite public presidential opposition. Picking your own referee, only to have him brandish a red card at you, takes a very special talent.

Voters, meanwhile, have noticed. In one mid-September poll, Trump’s approval on inflation stood at 24 per cent, matching his low with the pollster. A Data for Progress survey found 61 per cent blame Republicans more for rising gas prices, against 31 per cent for Democrats. The President has repeatedly asked voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot”, and they appear to be pretending with tremendous enthusiasm.

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The clock is ticking louder than a taxi meter in Mayfair. Absentee ballots are already coming back in North Carolina’s pivotal Senate race, and surveys from Democratic campaigns show races within the margin of error in seats Trump easily won two years ago. Those are partisan polls and should be taken with a pinch of salt, which, mercifully, is still affordable.

In fairness, his defenders have a case. Iran shut the Strait, not Washington. The Fed itself says economic activity is expanding at a solid pace, and core inflation eased to 2.4 per cent in August, the lowest since March 2021. The IMF even revised world growth to 3 per cent for 2026, arguing AI-driven demand has cushioned the oil shock. So this is less a collapse than a very expensive wobble. Rescue is conceivably in sight, too: Iran has reportedly proposed reopening Hormuz within seven days if the US lifts its blockade, just as Trump prepares to address the UN General Assembly. The author of The Art of the Deal has six weeks to make one. Otherwise, come November, the only thing running on empty will be his majority.

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🎬 Tip One: The Marlboro Moment

Tip One: Do not — we repeat, do not — tell your customers your product will kill them. Marlboro tried it. Benson & Hedges tried it. They spent fifty years and fifty billion dollars in litigation before anyone lit up the obvious: death is, surprisingly, a tough sell. You chaps seem to have managed to achieve the same PR catastrophe in about eighteen months. Impressive efficiency, at least.

🎬 Tip Two: The Hack and the Hug

Tip Two: Hacking your customers is generally frowned upon. But doing so, then watching your frenemy Nvidia swoop in to buy the very victim — Hugging Face — while looking like the White Knight? That’s not just bad PR. That’s weaponised PR. Nvidia thanks you. Enormously.

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🎬 Tip Three: The Infinite IPO

Tip Three: If you announce an IPO, try, try, to actually do it. Postponing indefinitely, presumably because your product will kill people while Chinese competitors are giving theirs away free, creates what industry insiders call a “doom loop.” Your doom loop. Of your own making. Majestic.

The PR Helpdesk is now closed. We need a lie-down.

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On 26 August 2026, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make substantial changes to Facebook and Instagram, settling claims brought by most US states and territories that it designed its platforms to encourage addictive use among children, misled consumers about their safety and improperly collected children’s data. The settlement does not establish that Meta acted wrongfully (the company continues to deny that) but demonstrates that the design choices behind engagement are now being challenged through litigation, legislation and public policy rather than accepted as immutable features of the internet.

The agreement still requires court approval. Even so, it brings to an end a closely watched federal trial at which Mark Zuckerberg had been expected to testify. We are thankfully spared the spectacle of a technology billionaire explaining human behaviour like somebody who has recently had it described to them.

The settlement requires Meta, for the next decade, to limit teenagers’ use of Facebook and Instagram to two hours a day and prevent access between midnight and 6am without parental consent. It also introduces restrictions on notifications during school hours, stronger age-assurance measures, tighter controls on age-inappropriate material, independent oversight and what the agreement calls “productive pauses”.

A productive pause sounds less like a product-safety mechanism than something suggested by Human Resources shortly before removing the biscuits from a meeting room. Still, it represents a formal attempt to place limits on the unlimited engagement upon which the social-media business model was built. Meta has, after many profitable years, discovered the off switch.

The financial figure sounds appropriately historic until it is placed alongside Meta’s approximately $201 billion in revenue during 2025. Reuters calculates that the settlement represents roughly three to four months of Meta’s profit. This makes it considerably more substantial than an ordinary corporate parking ticket, although unlikely to require a whip-round at Menlo Park or the sale of any emergency hoodies. The more consequential part of the agreement may therefore be the restrictions placed on the products themselves.

Everybody Had a Different Name for the Same Thing

The behaviour at the centre of the legal action (designing products to maximise time spent, emotional reaction and repeat visits) was never described the same way twice, because the modern digital economy relies heavily on finding reassuring names for things people might otherwise object to.

Platforms called it engagement. Newsrooms called it audience development. Advertisers called it attention. Consultants placed it inside a circular diagram and called it an ecosystem. Users, on reflection, were inclined to call it three hours of their life they would like back.

The terminology shifted with the audience, but the mechanism remained consistent: keep people on the platform, keep them reacting, and measure success by how much of their time could be absorbed before they noticed. If they became angry, anxious or unable to leave, this was not traditionally regarded as a design problem. It was an excellent session duration.

Publishers were not innocent bystanders dragged reluctantly into this system. They arrived carrying headlines and asking where to plug them in.

Throughout the 2010s, editorial decisions that had once been guided by news judgement, reader loyalty and the occasional terrifying editor-in-chief were increasingly guided by whatever the algorithm appeared to enjoy that morning. Headlines were restructured for shareability. Formats were rebuilt for the Facebook feed. Video was declared the future with such regularity that large numbers of journalists were dismissed to make room for it.

Commissioning meetings began to feature phrases such as “this could do well on social”, as though this were a journalistic criterion rather than a mild form of editorial surrender. Entire publishing strategies were based on attempting to interpret the moods of a mathematical system owned by another company. Medieval villagers studying the flight of birds had a broadly similar methodology, although rather less venture capital.

The media industry did not merely use the platforms. It trained itself to serve them, reorganising editorial behaviour around a reward system it could neither see nor control. It was less a partnership than a very long audition for a part Meta had not promised to cast.

The Productive Pause the Media Industry Never Received

Consider what Meta’s proposed protections might look like if applied to publishers rather than teenagers.

After fifteen minutes spent refreshing the analytics dashboard, an editor would receive a gentle notification asking whether they had considered commissioning something people might actually remember. After thirty minutes, the dashboard would be replaced by a photograph of a tree and the words: “There is a world beyond concurrent users.”

A responsible adult, perhaps a sub-editor of sound judgement and adequate caffeine levels, would have to approve any headline containing SLAMS, DESTROYS, BREAKS SILENCE, FURY or YOU WON’T BELIEVE. Headlines beginning “The internet is obsessed with…” would require documentary evidence that at least seven people had noticed.

Access to real-time audience data would be blocked after midnight without a parental PIN, on the reasonable grounds that nothing good has ever been decided at 1am in response to a traffic spike. Push notifications would be disabled during working hours so journalists could concentrate on journalism. Before publishing a fourth version of the same story in a single news cycle, the system would pause to ask: “Are you building an audience, or displaying signs of platform dependency?”

Editors would be limited to two hours a day of saying “the algorithm”. Once the allowance had been exhausted, they would have to identify an actual reader and explain what that person might want.

None of this would entirely cure the problem. Some publishers would immediately open a second account and claim it belonged to their parents. But it might at least introduce a moment of reflection into an industry that has spent years responding to declining social reach by posting more frequently.

The central difficulty was always that publishers reorganised themselves around engagement signals Meta controlled and could change whenever it wished. From around 2018 onwards, Meta progressively reduced the prominence of news in its feeds. Referral traffic fell sharply. Publishers discovered that the distribution infrastructure around which they had redesigned their businesses was not, technically speaking, theirs.

The industry had trained for an algorithm that subsequently lost interest. It was like spending years learning the tango only to discover that your partner had become very interested in short-form video and was now dancing with somebody called Creator Economy.

Meta moved on. Many newsrooms are still standing beside the dance floor holding a carefully optimised headline.

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Engagement Acquires a Health Warning

The more significant consequence of the settlement may not be the payment, however gratifyingly large the number appears in a press release, but the product changes it requires. If daily limits, notification controls, age assurance and independent oversight become standard safeguards, unlimited engagement begins to look less like an inevitable feature of the internet and more like a deliberate commercial choice.

That reframing matters because engagement has long been treated as a neutral indicator of public enthusiasm. More engagement meant a successful story, a healthier platform, or an especially impressive social media manager. Little distinction was made between a reader thoughtfully absorbing an investigation and somebody furiously typing beneath a photograph of a celebrity they had never met.

The dashboard counted both. Indeed, it often preferred the furious person.

Engagement is not necessarily evidence that something has informed, delighted or enriched its audience. It proves that something happened on a screen. A car alarm also generates engagement, but nobody builds an editorial strategy around one.

The settlement does not establish that Meta acted wrongfully, and the company continues to dispute the allegations. It does, however, confirm that the mechanisms used to maximise engagement deserve scrutiny rather than reverence. The algorithm is not weather. It was designed by people, adjusted by people and defended by people who generally preferred everyone else to discuss it as though it had formed naturally over the Pacific.

Publishers May Now Leave the Platform

For publishers, the lesson is not that social media should be abandoned. That is the kind of position that sounds magnificent at a conference and survives until somebody checks the traffic figures.

Social platforms remain useful for discovery, conversation and distribution. But rented distribution should not be mistaken for an owned audience, particularly when the landlord is free to remove the staircase without warning.

Newsletters, subscriptions, memberships and direct reader relationships are not glamorous substitutes for a viral post. They are infrastructure: connections that do not disappear because a platform adjusts its priorities on a Tuesday afternoon, discovers a new format or decides that news has become inconvenient.

The media spent years treating social reach as an audience when it was really temporary permission to stand in somebody else’s doorway. Meta’s settlement should remind publishers that a large number on a dashboard is not the same thing as a durable relationship, and visibility granted by an algorithm is not independence.

Teenagers may soon receive productive pauses, overnight controls and daily limits. Publishers will remain free to refresh the dashboard until their eyes water, publish a fifth version of the same story and announce that the audience strategy is “performing strongly” because somebody in Wolverhampton has posted an angry emoji.

There are, apparently, limits to how much protection society can provide.

Attention is something a platform extracts. A relationship is something a publisher earns.

This article was created, edited, illustrated, published, distributed and promoted using LettsNews, with every editorial decision remaining in the hands of its author.

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And honestly, it makes sense. The diary has always been one of the few places where female interiority gets to exist without interruption. A place to obsess, spiral, analyse, romanticise, confess, lie and occasionally incriminate yourself.

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The difference now is that the diary itself has changed. We no longer live entirely inside locked notebooks hidden under beds. Modern journaling is fragmented across Notes apps, voice memos, late-night searches, unfinished drafts, private playlists and emotional support group chats. Which is partly why platforms like jot feel oddly timely. They are less about recreating the old diary and more about rebuilding it for how people actually process their lives now.

So, in honour of the diary renaissance, here are the most iconic diarists in pop culture history, what their journaling style says about them, and why each one would probably have been terrifyingly attached to jot.

Bridget Jones: The Spreadsheet of Emotional Chaos

Bridget Jones’s Diary remains one of the purest examples of diary-as-survival. Bridget’s entries are half confession booth, half life audit. Calories consumed. Cigarettes smoked. Units of alcohol. Romantic humiliations endured before noon.

What makes Bridget such an enduring diarist is that her journaling is not aspirational. It is reactive. She journals because she is trying to understand herself while being battered by modern adulthood and deeply cursed dating prospects.

There is also something very Gen Z about her approach in retrospect: the self-awareness, the over-analysis, the way every tiny interaction becomes emotionally forensic evidence.

Bridget would thrive with modern journaling tools. Half her entries would begin as voice notes recorded while speed-walking home from a disastrous dinner. She would absolutely use emotional pattern tracking, study the results for three seconds, then text Daniel Cleaver anyway.

Most importantly, she would love journaling that does not require sitting down ceremoniously with a leather notebook and “processing.” Bridget journals in motion! On trains, hungover, mid-crisis. Which, increasingly, is how everyone journals now.

Carrie Bradshaw: Journaling Disguised as Journalism

People forget that Sex and the City is basically built around a diary structure... Carrie just monetised hers.

Every episode begins with a question she cannot answer emotionally, so she intellectualises it into a column. Her entire writing style is essentially: “What if I turned my personal dysfunction into cultural commentary?”

Which, to be fair, has become the blueprint for approximately half the internet.

Carrie processes through performance: her thoughts only become real once they have been narrated, shaped and, ideally, shared.

She would absolutely love conversational journaling. Not because she wants advice, but because she wants a responsive audience for every emotional revelation. She would ask one reflective question and somehow end up unpacking her entire attachment style by accident.

And the categorisation? Forget it. Carrie would have relationship entries tagged by era, man, emotional devastation level and whether she cried in public.

Hannah Horvath: Oversharing as an Art Form

Girls gave us Hannah Horvath, who approached writing with the energy of someone trying to emotionally bleed onto a Google Doc before anyone could stop her.

Hannah represents the diarist as memoirist, personal brand and, occasionally, person who says “I think I might be the voice of my generation” while actively ruining her own life.

She reframes everything into narrative; every bad thing happening to her becomes material before it has even emotionally settled.

In another life, Hannah would absolutely be posting cryptic Notes app screenshots at 2am.

She also captures why digital journaling suits modern thinking. Thoughts arrive messily. Half a sentence here, a voice note there, one devastating realisation typed at 1:47am. Hannah would need somewhere to dump it all and figure out what it means later.

Elena Gilbert: The Diary as Emotional Archive

Before vampires fully derailed her life, The Vampire Diaries begins with Elena journaling after the death of her parents.

And honestly, this might be one of the most emotionally accurate depictions of journaling in pop culture.

Elena does not journal because it is cute. She journals because grief creates emotional overflow and she has nowhere else to put it.

That is something journaling culture occasionally forgets. People rarely start documenting their lives because everything is going brilliantly. It usually happens when something has gone spectacularly wrong: breakups, grief, identity crises, loneliness - the general experience of being a person.

Elena’s diary becomes an emotional archive. A way of preserving herself while everything around her changes.

And that is where digital journaling becomes genuinely useful rather than merely aesthetic. The easier it is to journal, the more likely you are to do it when you actually need it. Not tomorrow, when you have bought the perfect notebook. Now.

Amy Dunne: Weaponised Journaling

We need to talk about Gone Girl.

Because Amy Dunne may be the most terrifying diarist in modern fiction.

Her diary is not reflective. It is strategic, curated, manipulated. A constructed emotional artefact designed to control perception.

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Which reveals something uncomfortable about diaries: they are never completely objective. Every diary is still a performance, even if the audience is just you.

Amy understands this better than anyone.

She writes herself into a character and she edits reality in real time. Her diary becomes less of a personal archive and more of a narrative weapon.

Would Amy use jot? Deeply unfortunately, yes. She would create colour-coded emotional profiles and build an immaculate behavioural timeline. She would abuse tagging systems with frightening efficiency.

But Amy also highlights something about modern journaling. People increasingly want their diaries to be searchable, organised and interconnected. Less a pile of disconnected entries, more a living map of their thoughts.

The Diary Was Never Meant to Stay Static

What all these characters reveal is that the diary has never really been about the format. It has always been about creating continuity between thoughts, feelings, memories, relationships and identity.

The problem is that modern life fractures all of that across different systems. Memories live in photos. Plans live in calendars. Emotions live in Notes apps. Relationships live in messages. Thoughts disappear into tabs you will absolutely never reopen.

The original diary held life together in one place.

Now, the digital diary is trying to do that again.

That is what makes this new wave of journaling feel bigger than another wellness trend. It is not necessarily about writing more. It is about reconnecting the pieces of yourself that modern technology accidentally scattered in the first place.

And honestly, Bridget Jones would probably have loved that.

Your life already exists in fragments. The modern diary just brings them back together. Explore it now at jot.

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It begins innocently enough. ChatGPT helps with some research. Then you discover a better research tool, something clever for coding and an AI that makes presentations without requiring you to spend Sunday evening nudging boxes three pixels to the left. Six months later you have 14 subscriptions and have forgotten what three of them do. This is called productivity.

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Startup Dreams, Mortgage Realities

The strange thing is that most of these tools are genuinely excellent. The research is better, the code arrives faster and things that once required a small team can now be done before lunch. Unfortunately, none of your artificial colleagues appears to have met. So the founder acquires a new job. You spend Monday morning explaining to one AI what another AI discovered on Friday. By lunchtime you’re copying a product decision somewhere else because the marketing AI is still enthusiastically promoting the feature you’ve just killed. At 3pm the fundraising AI resurrects it in the investor deck.

Nobody has employed a middle manager, which is excellent news, because you have become one. This is the slightly ridiculous state of the AI native startup. We have developed machines capable of writing software and reasoning over enormous quantities of information, then arranged them so that a human being has to wander between them carrying messages.

Somewhere, the inventor of the internal memo is feeling vindicated. The underlying mistake is treating a startup as a collection of jobs. It isn’t. A customer saying something unexpectedly rude about your product on Tuesday can change what gets built on Wednesday and make Friday’s revenue forecast look faintly embarrassing. Companies are chains of consequences disguised as departments.

37 Tab Founder Frenzy

That was manageable when execution was expensive. You had a marketing department because marketing required people, and a finance department because accountants became surprisingly territorial if you tried to do their work yourself. AI changes that bargain.

Yet our first instinct has been to recreate the old company in miniature and populate it with agents who never go to lunch but also never seem to talk to each other. Hence the emerging fashion for the AI employee. Soon every founder will apparently have an AI CFO, AI CMO and AI Head of Strategy. At the current rate, someone will launch an AI Chief Happiness Officer by Christmas and it will spend its days asking the other agents to complete an engagement survey.

There is a more interesting possibility. Instead of making every task intelligent, you make it harder for the company to be stupid. That means the useful bit isn’t simply memory. Remembering that you decided something six months ago is nice, but remembering why you decided it becomes considerably more useful when someone proposes the same bad idea again wearing a different hat.

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A company accumulates arguments, experiments, awkward customer conversations and expensive mistakes. Most software treats these as debris. But they may actually be the valuable bit. The models themselves will keep changing and today’s miraculous one will eventually be spoken about with the affection currently reserved for fax machines. The company’s accumulated context, meanwhile, becomes peculiar to the company.

From Tab Chaos to Shared Context

That’s the thinking behind what we’re building with LettsGroup VentureFactory. The interesting question for us isn’t how many AI agents a founder can command before developing the management problems they were supposed to eliminate. It’s whether the venture itself can become the shared system, so what is learned in one part of the company doesn’t have to be manually smuggled into another.

The founder doesn’t disappear in this version. They just stop being employed as human middleware. Judgement stays with the person who has money, reputation and possibly their house riding on the outcome, while the machines get on with the work they’re actually good at. Which leaves only one unresolved problem with the AI native company:

Finding the tab that’s playing music.

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And in Downing Street, Prime Minister Andy Burnham is absolutely delighted to tell you that he has just frozen the energy price cap for a further quarter and introduced a new scheme to help low-income families with their weekly shop. Which is, to be fair, genuinely useful. It is also, one cannot help noticing, roughly as relevant to a country in the grip of an unprecedented summer heatwave as handing out woolly jumpers at the gates of Pompeii.

Welcome to the Burnham era. It is, so far, a masterclass in the politics of the achievable - relentlessly focused, impressively communicated, and operating at a temperature approximately forty degrees cooler than the national emergency unfolding outside the window.

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The Small Wins Machine

To give credit where it is absolutely due: Burnham has been very, very good at the retail politics game. The man who spent years as Greater Manchester’s metro mayor mastering the art of the visible, tangible, photographable policy win has brought that entire playbook to Number Ten, and it is working. Freeze a bill here, cap a price there, announce a pilot scheme in a marginal constituency with a friendly local MP and a professionally grateful family standing nearby - rinse, repeat, watch the focus groups purr.

The communications operation is, frankly, extraordinary. Every policy announcement arrives pre-packaged with real people, real savings, real receipts. Last Tuesday, the government announced a new scheme capping the cost of children’s school uniforms. By Wednesday morning, every morning show in Britain had a relieved-looking mum from Swindon explaining that it would save her £47. By Thursday, Burnham was in a playground in Swindon wearing a slightly too-large high-visibility jacket and looking absolutely thrilled about it. The man knows the assignment.

The polls reflect it. Burnham sits at a comfortable lead - not a landslide, not a revolution, but a steady, reassuring cushion of approval from a public that, after years of political chaos, is deeply grateful for a government that appears to be broadly competent and only occasionally embarrassing. For now...

The Heatwave in the Room

Which brings us, inexorably, to the planet. It is, in case you had somehow missed it, absolutely cooking. The UK has now recorded its hottest June since records began, its second-hottest July, and August is shaping up to be less a summer month and more a sustained act of atmospheric aggression. Infrastructure is buckling. Hospitals are overwhelmed. The phrase “unprecedented heat event” has been used so many times by Met Office spokespeople that it has essentially lost all meaning, which is itself rather a profound statement about where we are.

Burnham’s response to all of this has been, to choose a word carefully, measured. There have been warm words, appropriately enough, about the climate transition. There has been a restatement of existing net zero commitments. There has been a working group. There is, apparently, a review. What there has conspicuously not been is anything resembling the urgent, this-is-a-crisis, we-are-changing-everything energy that the moment rather obviously demands.

Asked directly last week whether the heatwaves had changed his thinking on the pace of climate action, the Prime Minister said - and this is a direct quote - “We are absolutely committed to our ambitious climate targets and we will be setting out further details in due course.” In due course. Britain is a rotisserie. Due course.

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The Farage Factor

Here, though, is where Burnham’s extraordinary luck comes into sharp focus. Because while a more ruthless opposition might be making considerable hay from a government that seems constitutionally incapable of treating a climate emergency as an emergency, the official opposition is currently far too busy imploding to bother.

Nigel Farage, the man who was, as recently as three months ago, being described in certain excitable right-wing publications as “the most dangerous man in British politics”, has spent the summer losing by-elections even when he wins them, watching his popularity melt like his excuses about dodgy funding, and giving interviews in which he appears to be arguing with himself about what his party actually stands for. It has been, by any measure, a catastrophic few weeks.

The by-election debacles in particular have been the gift that simply will not stop giving. Forced to battle with a council-approved bin, Farage managed to simultaneously win the election safely, and yet massively embarrass himself by proving that a fifth of his constituency was more than happy to replace him with a fake space alien (that bin again). Farage himself has responded to this in the manner of a man who has been told his restaurant has received a one-star review and has chosen to blame the customers. The polling tells the same story: Reform is falling, Burnham is rising, and the Prime Minister is reaping the considerable political reward of simply not being Nigel Farage.

The Honeymoon’s Golden Glow

It is, in short, a honeymoon - and a rather spectacular one at that. Burnham is popular, his opponents are a shambles, and the government’s small-wins communications machine hums along producing a daily output of reassuring, useful, voter-friendly policy that keeps the news cycle full and the focus groups happy.

The question, the only question, really, is whether the comfort zone becomes the destination rather than the starting point. A PM who is brilliant at freezing the energy price cap is genuinely valuable. A PM who responds to a country that is structurally, visibly, measurably overheating with a working group and a promise to set out further details in due course is something rather less than the moment requires.

Britain, right now, needs both the woolly jumper and the fire extinguisher. Andy Burnham is very, very good at woolly jumpers. The question of whether he can find the extinguisher, and whether he will bother looking while the polls are this good, may well define not just his premiership, but the summer that follows this one, and the one after that.

In Wolverhampton, meanwhile, it is now 39 degrees. The bus pass lady has given up entirely and gone inside. One cannot blame her. Due course, apparently, has not yet arrived.

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See you next week... (is our daily prayer ritual).

In the mean time we wish you all a little Zen. If you happen to see our flare - call the rescue service!

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Remember when putting content online meant infinite audiences, boundless reach, and metrics reported with the gravity of a moon landing? I do! From PowerPoint arrows to Facebook algorithms, here’s the gloriously chaotic story of how the internet ate media for breakfast.

I have spent a fair portion of my career in rooms where people discussed “digital strategy”, “digital transformation” and, eventually, “customer engagement”. These were normally very expensive rooms, filled with very serious people and at least one slide showing a series of arrows pointing towards the word ENGAGEMENT.

The proposition was always irresistible. If you put your content online, people will see it. Give it to Google, people will find it. Give it to Facebook, people will share it. Optimise for the algorithms and audiences will arrive in numbers previously available only to the BBC, royal weddings and videos of cats.

It worked.

Publishers received traffic. Brands acquired followers. Journalists discovered search optimisation. Marketing departments learnt to report “reach” with the seriousness previously reserved for revenue. Entire careers were built around managing audiences that technically belonged to Mark Zuckerberg.

I watched much of this unfold from the brand, marketing and communications side of the fence. We were hardly innocent bystanders. We embraced the same promise of reach, engagement and apparently limitless digital audiences because it seemed to make sense. The platforms had the audiences; organisations had the content. They would provide the distribution; we would provide the reason anyone turned up.

Unfortunately, there was a flaw in this elegant bargain: the platforms took the content, the distribution, the audience relationship and, in due course, most of the advertising money, while publishers were left with the journalism itself. A touching arrangement, really, since someone still had to provide the raw material for everyone else’s business model.

This is how a proper fool’s bargain works. Nobody asks for your house on the first day. They begin with the spare key, explain that it will improve discoverability and return three months later to measure the curtains.

When Traffic Was Still a Currency

Google’s original bargain with publishers was simple enough. It indexed journalism, displayed a fragment of it and sent interested readers to the source. Publishers objected occasionally, but the traffic was valuable. The arrangement broadly worked.

Then social media arrived with something even more seductive: enormous audiences and no discernible entry fee.

Building on Borrowed Land

Publishers built Facebook pages, accumulated Twitter followers, and hired teams to feed the platforms throughout the day. Editors began thinking about what Facebook wanted. They adapted their Headlines. They spent time developing Video strategies. Newsrooms produced increasingly elaborate meals for diners who remained seated in somebody else’s restaurant.

We called this audience development, but looking back, a remarkably sophisticated way of being taken for a ride might have been more accurate.

When Facebook subsequently changed its priorities and reduced the organic distribution of publisher content, the industry reacted like a man who has spent five years renovating his rented flat and is astonished when the landlord raises the rent.

The audience had never really belonged to the publishers. They had just been allowed to stand near it for a while.

AI has now refined the arrangement. Previously, a search engine extracted a small part of an article and sent the occasional reader back. It can now ingest the article, digest it, answer the reader’s question and remove the tiresome administrative burden of visiting the person who paid to produce it. This is described as innovation, largely because “industrial-scale content digestion” performs badly in consumer research.

Suing the Machine That Feeds You

The publishers’ response has achieved an almost operatic level of confusion. They are blocking AI crawlers, suing AI companies, licensing content to AI companies and exploring partnerships with AI companies, sometimes while remaining dependent on the same companies for search traffic, cloud infrastructure, and advertising revenue. This is less a negotiating strategy than a hostage situation with a breakout room.

Perhaps this is the point at which publishers finally decide that journalism is not merely something they make to generate traffic. Perhaps the work itself has value. Perhaps anybody wishing to use it to build a search result, train a model or produce an automated answer should have to pay for it.

This is not an especially radical proposition. Tesco does not hand out free groceries because a satisfied customer might mention them to a friend. My plumber has never offered to repair the boiler in return for discoverability. Only the media managed to convince itself that giving away its product was a sophisticated distribution strategy.

The internet did not exactly steal journalism. That would be a much more comforting story. The industry uploaded it, optimised it, reformatted it and delivered it in machine-readable form. It then supplied performance reports showing the recipient which bits were most valuable.

Somewhere in a Californian data centre, an AI is now condensing the whole episode into five bullet points. The first will almost certainly be: “Publishers face challenges adapting to a changing digital landscape.”

Which is one way of putting it.

The Times newspaper can flush their “best company to work for” awards.

And we’ll be back quicker than a flash!

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

We still talk about “the mainstream media” as though it consists of the BBC, The New York Times, ITV News, CNN and a man in a sensible tie apologising for interrupting The Antiques Roadshow. That world still exists, but it is no longer where most opinions are formed. Millions of people now receive their understanding of politics, economics, science and society from people who have never worked in a newsroom, never answered to an editor and never had anyone ask the deeply inconvenient question, “Are you absolutely sure that’s true?”

The conspiracy theorists did not defeat the mainstream media. They built another a new media. This new media has presenters, correspondents, documentaries, investigative journalists, breaking news banners, premium subscriptions, advertising deals and loyal audiences. It has heroes and villains. It has its own celebrities, its own experts and its own villains of the week. Most importantly, it has discovered something newspapers have always known. Belief is a business.

The internet promised to democratise knowledge. Instead, it democratised publishing. Those are not the same thing. Gutenberg accidentally helped create the Enlightenment because printing books spread ideas. Silicon Valley accidentally created the largest belief factory in human history because it discovered that outrage keeps people staring at glowing rectangles for just a little bit longer. Nobody at YouTube sat around a conference table asking how to undermine liberal democracy. Nobody at TikTok decided the future required convincing otherwise sensible adults that Taylor Swift is secretly directing Pentagon weather satellites. The algorithm is not ideological. It is commercial. It has only one job. Keep you watching.

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Unfortunately, attention and truth have never enjoyed a particularly close relationship. Imagine you are the algorithm. A thoughtful discussion about fiscal policy arrives on your desk. Moments later another video appears with a red arrow, three exploding emojis and the words “THEY LIED TO YOU.” Which one keeps people watching for another ten minutes? Which one generates furious comments? Which one persuades someone to send it to six friends before breakfast? The algorithm has no opinion on immigration, climate change, transgender rights or taxation. It simply notices that human beings are gloriously incapable of resisting certainty wrapped in emotion. It has quietly rediscovered what newspaper barons, television producers and tabloid editors spent a century learning. Outrage sells.

The political consequences have been profound. The populist right has understood this ecosystem faster than almost anyone else. Tucker Carlson no longer needs a television network to command an audience that rivals one. Candace Owens reaches millions by speaking directly into a camera. Charlie Kirk has built an organisation that functions as much like a media company as a political movement. Fox News increasingly resembles a bridge between the old media and the new, borrowing the rhythms of social media while retaining the authority of television. In Britain, GB News has created an entirely different political conversation, proving that there was a significant audience waiting for an alternative to the broadcasting consensus.

None of this means the arguments of the populist right are necessarily wrong. Some are persuasive, others plainly are not. The point is that their extraordinary success cannot be explained simply by examining the quality of their ideas. They have mastered the economics of modern attention. They understand that a ninety second clip matters more than a ninety minute parliamentary debate. They know that confidence spreads faster than caution and that declaring civilisation to be collapsing will always outperform admitting that public policy is, regrettably, rather complicated.

It would be comforting to pretend this is exclusively a phenomenon of the right. It is not. The left has its own activist influencers, ideological YouTubers and online personalities whose audiences also reward certainty over complexity. Yet there is a noticeable difference. The contemporary right has produced a remarkable number of media entrepreneurs whose influence now rivals, and in some cases exceeds, traditional broadcasters. They are no longer commentators on politics. They are political institutions.

At the same time, there are encouraging signs that another model still has a future. Few people predicted that one of Britain’s most successful political podcasts would consist largely of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart doing something almost revolutionary. Listening to each other. The Rest Is Politics has become a remarkable success precisely because it refuses to manufacture permanent outrage. It trusts its audience to tolerate uncertainty. It demonstrates that millions of people are still willing to spend an hour listening to two intelligent adults admit that complicated questions rarely produce simple answers.

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Across the Atlantic, The Atlantic has quietly staged one of journalism’s most surprising revivals. While much of the industry has chased clicks like a Labrador chasing tennis balls, it has doubled down on reporting, editing and long form analysis. It has built a profitable business by making a rather old fashioned wager that there are still enough readers who value careful thinking over emotional theatre.

One wonders whether there is an equivalent standard bearer on today’s conservative side. Historically there were publications such as National Review in America or The Spectator in Britain, magazines that prized ideas over personalities. Today the centre of gravity has shifted elsewhere. Conservative attention increasingly flows towards individuals rather than institutions. People no longer ask what a newspaper thinks. They ask what Tucker thinks. Or Candace. Or whichever narrator the algorithm has decided should explain the world this week.

Perhaps that is the biggest transformation of all. We no longer trust institutions. We trust narrators. The most unsettling aspect of this revolution is how invisible it is. We imagine ourselves making independent choices, yet every click teaches the algorithm a little more about us. Every recommendation becomes fractionally more provocative than the last. Every thumbnail a little more dramatic. Every presenter a little more certain. Nobody falls down the rabbit hole in a single leap. They wander into it one autoplay at a time.

Psychologists have long understood that familiarity breeds credibility. We are more likely to believe something we encounter repeatedly, even if we cannot remember where we first heard it. The algorithm exploits this quirk with breathtaking efficiency. The people living next door probably have not changed very much. The people living inside your phone have. Increasingly, they know you better than your neighbours do, they speak to you for longer, and they slowly become the voices you trust. Elections are no longer fought only in town halls or television studios. They are fought inside millions of individually curated realities.

We like to imagine our opinions are formed by experience. Increasingly, they are formed by repetition. Not because somebody ordered us to think differently, but because the same handful of voices appear on our screens every day until familiarity starts to feel like truth. The algorithm does not change your mind overnight. It quietly changes what feels normal.

That may be the most remarkable achievement of all. The twentieth century taught us to fear governments that controlled information. The twenty first may require us to think much harder about markets that optimise it. Nobody instructed the algorithm to produce division. Nobody ordered it to reward certainty or punish nuance. It simply discovered, through billions of tiny experiments, that anger is profitable, certainty is addictive and complexity is terrible for engagement. The market optimised for attention. Politics adapted and journalism followed.

The result is a world in which podcasters, YouTubers and commentators now face exactly the same ethical questions that newspaper editors once did. Are you merely asking questions, or are you shaping beliefs? Once your audience numbers in the millions, can you honestly claim you are simply having a conversation? If your livelihood depends upon keeping people emotionally invested, how many creators can resist becoming just a little more certain than the evidence allows?

We have spent the last century worrying about the economics of oil, the economics of trade and the economics of labour. We have paid far less attention to the economics of belief. Yet belief has quietly become the most valuable commodity of all. It is bought with attention, traded through algorithms and monetised with advertising. The winners are not always those with the strongest evidence. Increasingly, they are those with the strongest business model.

Perhaps the defining political question of the next decade is no longer simply who governs us. It is who profits from what we believe. Because if markets now determine which ideas rise, which voices dominate and which stories become our reality, then before we ask who won the argument, perhaps we should ask a much simpler question.

When every influencer has a television studio, every citizen has a printing press and every algorithm has become an invisible editor, where will we get our news, who will we trust, and how will we know that what we believe is actually true?