Lingering is underrated.
I think it’s probably because we conflate it with loitering, which is unfair.
When you find the right place, time, or person, go ahead and linger.
Daily one-pagers about AI, leadership, technology, and being human.
johnmaconline
I'm writing to think, learn, and remember in public. I'll be here everyday.
Most Important Thinkers in 2026
“Hey Astra, who are the most important thinkers in 2026?”
ChatGPT: [proceeds to list 10 people in the AI world]
“Those are all AI thinkers. Are there other fields that are important?”
ChatGPT: Oh, yes, my mistake. I’ll broaden my answer. Once I stop treating “most important” as shorthand for “AI,” my list changes substantially.
My criterion is whose ideas give us the most leverage for understanding the forces shaping human society in 2026 not who is smartest, most famous, or has had the greatest lifetime influence.
My top 10 thinkers alive in 2026:
| Rank | Thinker | The big idea | Selected work |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Daron Acemoglu | Technology doesn’t determine the future. Institutions and power determine who benefits from technology. | MIT profile and research · Power and Progress |
| 2 | Peter Turchin | Societies destabilize when inequality, declining living standards, elite competition, and weakening institutions converge. | Peter Turchin · End Times |
| 3 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | We systematically misunderstand uncertainty; build systems that survive what we cannot predict. | Nassim Taleb · Incerto |
| 4 | Thomas Piketty | Wealth compounds into economic—and ultimately political—power. | Thomas Piketty · World Inequality Database |
| 5 | Jonathan Haidt | Technology is changing childhood, attention, socialization, institutions, and the psychological foundations of society. | Jonathan Haidt · The Anxious Generation |
| 6 | Vaclav Smil | Civilization ultimately runs on physical systems: energy, materials, food, and infrastructure—not narratives or software. | Vaclav Smil · Books |
| 7 | Demis Hassabis | AI’s biggest consequence may not be automating work; it may be accelerating scientific discovery itself. | Google DeepMind · AlphaFold |
| 8 | Byung-Chul Han | Modern people increasingly exploit themselves through productivity, attention, performance, and digital systems. | The Burnout Society · Psychopolitics |
| 9 | Francis Fukuyama | Successful societies require capable institutions, legitimacy, trust, and recognition—not merely elections or markets. | Stanford profile · Political Order and Political Decay |
| 10 | Dario Amodei | Exponentially improving machine intelligence is beginning to outrun the institutions capable of governing it. | Dario Amodei essays · Machines of Loving Grace |
Enrollment
Nobody cares as much about your thing as you do.
Not your employees. Not your colleagues. Not your customers. Not your partner.
Unless they enroll.
Enrollment requires conditions that let someone else care. Those conditions might be purpose, ownership, voice, belief, stake, contribution, feedback, belonging, recognition, autonomy, or any number of others.
If you need someone else to care as much as you do, it’s your job to create the conditions for enrollment.
Why Not Now?
The bucket-list vacation. The move away from here to somewhere you always wanted to be. The new job or new business.
There might be good reasons that now isn’t the time.
But inertia isn’t one of them. Nor is fear of what-if. Nor is comfort.
Why not now?
Community Building
For almost 200 years, the US has had two great, almost universal community-building institutions.
Schools and workplaces.
Remote school and work through computers and the internet, and now the AI accelerator has and will continue to break down these institutions for community building. Less and less proximity will inevitably lead to less community.
We have tons of other community-building institutions, of course. But there’s just something about these two that tugs at me a bit.
I do wonder — and also hope — if our new reality will provide new community-building opportunities.
When we find them, let’s lean in.
Time Dilation
Time passes differently for me than it does for you.
Physics says so.
It also passes differently for you now than it did when you were younger. Time speeds up as we get older. The seasons come quicker. The vacations are shorter. The numbers go up faster.
The future becomes the near future, or even now. What was possibility becomes reality or never gonna happen. What might be either is or never will be.
The time is yours. What will you do with it?
Cutting Off Big Heads
“Wall Street banks are pushing large law firms to cut fees, arguing that the business model that has enriched top lawyers for decades is not sustainable in an era of AI.”
From Marginal Revolution
Even though this makes complete sense, it’s hard to see how this will play out. Big firms are really good at making money and, even more so, protecting that revenue stream.
Yes, AI should knock down the costs. But will it?
Big heads are hard to cut off.
Scale of Complexity
“Don’t build a space shuttle to drive down the street to the grocery store.”
AI does the research. It creates the documents. It writes the code. It tests the code.
You’re the overseer with a million ideas. You think they’re good ideas.
We’ve always had to worry about building something too complex, too featureful, and too hyperbolic for the set of requirements. That’s part of the product and engineering tradeoff. And the friction of building has helped keep this problem in check.
Space shuttles, for all of their awesomeness, are terrible grocery-getters.
Requirements still matter. Even if building it is frictionless.
Business Loans and Dinner Plans
Remember the annoyance of spam emails? Ah, the good ole days.
Now it’s…
“Hey, remember me? Wanna have dinner again?”
And
“Hello, I’m Jane, your loan officer. You’ve been approved for…”
I’m getting about 15 of these a day in various forms into my text and voicemail. I’m sure you are as well.
Computers made spam almost frictionless and costless, but at least someone had to sit in a chair and do something. AI breaks those chains. A prompt plus a few tokens, and you have an autonomous spamming army.
Thanks, AI.
We’re gonna need some friction.
Nothing Coming Out
If you’re stuck and nothing’s coming out.
No big ideas. No curiosity. Nothing you’re working out.
Maybe it’s because nothing interesting is going in.
Keep the inflow interesting and plentiful.