Anthony Ha

@anthonyha

Writer, @TechCrunch.com weekend editor, Original Content co-host, loud karaoke singer

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Anthony Ha@anthonyha· 13d

I was nervous about interviewing Jill Lepore but it turned out to be a lot of fun techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/h...

Lepore: In some ways, they’re silly examples. But you see the ways in which these corporations, these tech companies from Silicon Valley, and especially their charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders, are just taking on the trappings of the nation-state and the functions of democracy.
They’re not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it’s like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad, except that it takes itself so seriously. And these companies have so much power.
But that said, the book doesn’t begin in 1984. I just think that’s a good example of our modern era and the way a fun advertising campaign turns into a kind of delusional fantasy on the part of people like Sam Altman.

Lepore: By the time you get to, I think it’s 2012 — many years into Twitter’s fairly short history — they publish this thing called the Twitter Politics and Elections Handbook, which is really a guide for political candidates and elected officials and how to most effectively use Twitter. And then they begin the rollout of, “It’s a town hall in your pocket, and it’s improving our democracies because we’re restoring the defunct New England town meeting,” and that’s all just bananas.
Objectively, nothing could be further from the truth. At that time, one in five Americans had a Twitter account. Most people who had Twitter accounts had never used them, and above 90% of all tweets about politics were posted by fewer than 10% of the people that did use Twitter all the time. There was no way in which Twitter was a representation of the electorate. Twitter was a representation of the most extreme, politically active, hyper-partisan among Americans, who were following politics really avidly. Looking at it now, we can see, “Well, that’s really just a distortion machine. And if politicians are using it to gauge the electorate, they’re getting really bad information.”

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jul 18

Fun Mamdani interview, but I think we can go ahead and retire "Democrat or democratic socialist?" and "what is the exact upper income limit of the working class?" as questions www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/m...

Question: Do you see yourself as a Democrat or a democratic socialist? Because you said “our party,” and obviously you ran as a Democrat.

Answer: I am both. I’m a Democrat and I’m democratic socialist. So much of what makes me proud to be a Democrat is looking at what our party used to stand for. You think about the Four Freedoms, you think F.D.R., you think the New Deal. Those are at the core of what our party’s identity is, and yet it feels like to experience it, you have to read about it. You can’t see it around you anymore. And that isn’t something that I’m willing to accept, and I know that many feel similarly.

Question: So someone making $250,000 a year is working class?

Answer: I haven’t asked myself where it starts and stops. What I would say is those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren’t able to do so, I think that that is also working class. Oftentimes we’re asked how we divide this country. I think there’s only one majority in this country — it’s the working class.

Question: That just doesn’t ring true to me.

Answer: What do you think?

Question: It just seems a very easy answer to what is a complicated question. Because politically, if you’re saying everyone is the working class, or anyone that gets a salary is the working class, yes, that opens up your tent. But practically speaking, we are divided by income — and especially if you want to tax people, where you draw those lines matter.

Answer: I’ve drawn it at about a million dollars a year.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jul 18

LinkedIn remains a god tier social network

LinkedIn message offering me "FREE Professional Teeth Whitening" that's supposedly only offered to "a small number of TechCrunch employees in NYC"

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jul 5

So proud to be a verified editorial contact path

Pitch email for TechCrunch that reads, "Thought of you because Anthony Ha is publicly listed on TechCrunch's current team page, making this a verified editorial contact path."

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jul 5

Celebrating our nation’s 250th birthday with a classic tale of American heroism

A still from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jun 28

It was nice of @ibogost.com to just let me air out my anxieties about aging and obsolescence in the middle of our interview techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/w...

Question: I love that the book is so rooted in personal experience and in sensory experience. But as someone who’s 43 and had a lot of these feelings, I start to get a little suspicious of myself. Am I just an old fart longing for [the experiences of my youth]? How do you think about these things in a way that’s not just about romanticizing the way things were?
Answer: It is very, very easy to slip into nostalgia, and I think there’s a current strain of desire that’s oriented toward so-called analog culture. Like, “I’m gonna get a Walkman again and that’s going to solve my problems.”
I have a few thoughts about it. First, I make this argument pretty clearly in the book: We’re not going back. You live in the present, into the future, and we don’t live in the past.

Lamenting what came before and has been lost is useful insofar as it can orient you, but it’s not really useful in helping you live your life.
I love, love, love the telephone, I love the old-school Western Electric-style handset, I love how intimate they are, I love how they feel in my hand, I love the heft of it. [But now] we’re on Zoom, or at best we’re on our headphones. That’s not going to change. And so instead of looking at that example and going, “Ah, if only we could go back and we can maybe through this hipster reclamation of nostalgia“ — okay, that’s an interesting signal. I remember that, and that was meaningful to me, and a good way to orient yourself toward your actual sensory life.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jun 26

ok sure britmonkey.com/2020s-politi...

Internet quiz results that claim I’m 83% woke, 62% nep-ludditr, 59% hope-pilled and 88% Davos. As a result, my closest match is Zohran Mamdani

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jun 24

Love that these dumb Kalshi ads were inescapable in Harlem yesterday

An ad for Kalshi showing odds for the NY-13 Democratic congressional primary, with Adriano Espaillat (who lost) showing a 70% chance of victory, while Darializa Avila Chevalier (who won) supposedly had a 30% chance

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jun 19

"whoops we made a movie where Sam Altman and Elon Musk look like real pieces of shit" variety.com/2026/film/gl...

Variety understands that, prior to being dropped by Amazon, “Artificial” already had several test screenings, which went down very positively, and screened for other studios on Thursday. According to an insider who has seen the movie, the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would “like the least.” It’s also understood that Amazon had seen all the early iterations of the script, before Guadagnino boarded the project.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jun 14

upper west side

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jun 6

CEOs replacing themselves with chatbots is possibly the funniest form of AI psychosis www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/b...

It started as a writing assistant. Jeremy Allaire, the C.E.O. of the stablecoin company Circle, trained an A.I. agent to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of internal communications.

He called it the “Jeremy Allaire skill.” The bot helped him compose drafts. And Allaire was impressed by how well the artificial intelligence captured the way he thinks and writes.

So impressed that he decided to let the bot talk to his more than 1,000 employees. Because while Allaire can’t meet with everyone, he realized that the A.I. version of him can.

“People can interact with the Jeremy Allaire skill on their own before they actually, you know, bring something to me,” he told DealBook, adding, “It’s available to everyone in the company who wants to have a dialogue with me.”

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· May 31

That said <clears throat> I was worried about the same thing, asked China Miéville about it, and found his answer reasonably persuasive techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/a...

Interview with China Miéville, interviewer asks: "A big part of my response when I see something like that is to think, “You guys are bad readers, and you’re just fixated on the gadgets, as opposed to the more interesting or radical political or social notions.” But on some level, I also think, “Are they just subscribing to this ur-narrative that a lot of science fiction sells: Won’t it be great when we go to Mars? Won’t it be great to expand outward and colonize forever?” And I guess I’m wondering to what extent that should spur science-fiction writers to try to tell different kinds of narratives.
Miéville responds: I mean, I’m not the cop. People can tell any kind of story they want. I reserve the right to criticize them and critique them.
I should say, by the way, I completely agree with you about bad reading, but I also just think that writers and critics, no matter how brilliant we may be, we don’t own the books. They are always a collaboration. And all books, particularly the most interesting fiction, [are] always going to have contradictory threads.

China Miéville quote: My feeling is: I don’t think there is a story we can tell which someone who — because of the structural position they’re in, as well as maybe their psychology, but those two are not unrelated — I don’t think there’s a story we can tell that they are not going to be able to say, “Yes, what this tells me is, I should make loads of money and be fantastically powerful, whatever it takes.” I don’t think we can do that.
None of this means that I’m not interested in books that do tell interesting stories and untold stories and radical stories and so on. I absolutely am, and if people come to them and are radicalized by them, great. But that, I think, is fundamentally not something we can hope for.
I would like us to be writing more interesting stories as a function of the fact that the world was getting better. I do not think that by us writing different stories, we’re going to make the world better. I just don’t think that’s the line of causality. There are simply too many layers of mediation from a book up into the social system.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· May 27

strawberry cheese pie

a disgusting, nearly empty cheesecake container (disgusting because i’ve smeared crumbs and frosting everywhere), with a label reading ,”strawberry cheese pie”

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· May 26

tolkien catching strays in the pope discourse www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/u...

The document has a particularly American appeal. Leo specifically references the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — the only national conference to get a callout — in a section about caring for young people facing job insecurity. He quotes J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Return of the King,” a novel beloved by many in America, particularly young men.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· May 17

screenshot of bluesky’s muted words menu, the name “briahna joy gray” is being muted

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· May 16

This is the stuff www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-as-the-...

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· May 12

RIP Rex Reed, a man who hated kimchi opus.ing/posts/rex-re...

Infamous passage from Rex Reed's review of Oldboy: "What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?"

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Apr 3

Print this, frame it www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-t...

In a November conversation at the Urban Consulate in Detroit, the great writer and thinker Tressie McMillan Cottom was asked by host Orlando P. Bailey, “Do you have a daring idea for us to ponder and sit with for our collective future?” McMillan Cottom replied with this: “When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that this promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled—AI is already here, the end is already here—then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.”
Today, I refuse.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Apr 1

Weird hill to die on, Jimmy (from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #50, written by Otto Binder, art by Curt Swan)

Title: The Weirdest Asteroid in Space

panel of Jimmy Olsen and a scientist looking at a sperm whale

Jimmy: Wow! Your life-sized replicas pf the *world’s biggest beasts* are great, Professor Burton! I’ll give you a good write-up in the *Daily Planet*!

Panel of Jimmy Olsen and the professor looking at an exhibit sign

Sign: Whale that swallowed Jonah

Jimmy: But wait, professor! Everybody knows that no whale’s throat was ever big enough to swallow a man!

Professor: I disagree, Olsen! My theory is that this was an ancient species pf the *wide throat whale*!

Panel of Jimmy Olsen walking away from the professor and gesturing dismissively

Professor: And it could have swallowed Jonah!

Jimmy: But I can’t swallow your theory, professor! I’ll give you 24 hours to remove that misleading sign … or I won’t recommend your exhibit to my readers!

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Mar 29

From now on this is the only way I will travel

Photo from Buffalo’s Pierce-Arrow Museum of the front of a golden hippo car.

Photo from Buffalo’s Pierce-Arrow Museum of the back of a golden hippo car.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Mar 22

Once in a while I let myself get extremely petty, as a treat

My response: Hi thanks for reaching out, but: 1) I did not launch Sight Tech Global, 2) I deleted my X account in 2024, and 3) I no longer use Threads.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Mar 14

AI-washing "is not a technology story; it’s a management honesty story that happens to involve technology." www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

A Resume.org survey of 1,000 hiring managers found that 59% say they emphasize AI’s role in layoffs because it “is viewed more favorably by stakeholders than saying layoffs or hiring freezes are driven by financial constraints.” Only 9% said AI had fully replaced any roles. This is not a technology story; it’s a management honesty story that happens to involve technology.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Feb 28

Currently the top item on Hacker News: How to delete your account at openAI news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4719...

Screenshot of a Hacker News discussion linking to a "how to delete your account" page for OpenAI.

First comment: Posting it here as a top-level comment as many people asked why boycott just openAi:
-----
openAI is the least trustworthy of the Big LLM providers. See S(c)am Altman's track record, especially his early comments in senate hearings where:
* he warned of engagement-optimisation strategies, like social media, being used for chatbots / LLMs.
* also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies.
Both of his own warnings he casually ignored as ChatGPT / openAI has now fully converted to Facebook's tactics of "move fast and break things" - even if it is society itself. A complete turn away from the original AI for science lab it was founded as, which explains why every real (founding) ML scientist has left the company years ago.
While still being for-profit outfits, at least DeepMind and Anthrophic are headed by actual scientists - not marketing guys. At least for me, that brings me some confidence in their intentions as, as scientists we often seek knowledge, not power for power's sake.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Feb 22

I just keep reading these quotes and cackling www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/t...

“Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow,” Mr. Altman said at an A.I. conference this month.

Jensen Huang, chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, is worried. The tech industry hype may seem omnipresent, but Mr. Huang feels “the battle of narratives” is being won by the critics.

“It’s extremely hurtful, frankly,” Mr. Huang said in a podcast interview last month. “A lot of damage” has been done by “very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end-of-the-world narrative, science fiction narrative.”

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Feb 15

If, like @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social, you think "taking AI seriously" means "stronger unions, strong regulations, and a stronger social safety net" then hell yes. Buuuuuut I think that's rarely what people mean. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/minimum-st...

Unionization of the work force: Unless you believe that the US government is capable of independently solving these problems (while being in the industry’s pocket), it is clear that there must be some entities that exist for the sole purpose of protecting the workers who are exposed to having their livelihoods destroyed by AI. Those entities are unions. Union contracts, not laws, are the very front lines of AI regulation. Even if the biggest thing that union contracts accomplish is managing the reduction in jobs in a way that doesn’t utterly screw workers, that is significant. Right now, less than 10% of American workers have unions, meaning that most workers are exposed to unilateral damage from AI with no safety net. Policies like reforming labor law to make organizing easier and funding more union organizing are not old-timey things—they are, in fact, necessary policies to address our AI future. Also, as a practical matter, we are going to need the political influence of strong unions to counteract the political influence of the rich, which will be fighting against the other items on this policy list. Including,
A stronger social safety net, including higher unemployment benefits, public health care, free higher education, and other common sense measures necessary to get a large number of newly unemployed people through the hard times and into whatever comes next. And,

Much higher taxes on the rich: We will need a significant federal wealth tax in some form in order to avoid the scenario that Dario Amodei himself describes of a small handful of individuals who control the AI industry becoming so insanely rich, as they centralize the income that once flowed to many other industries, that they are effectively running the country and the world. America’s wealth inequality is already a crisis. AI could make it significantly worse. At some point democracy will fully crumble. Not allowing people to get that rich is necessary if we want to avoid having unaccountable godlike dictators. And finally, as a related matter,
Strong government regulation of the AI industry: There are more safety regulations involved in making a car than there are in releasing an AI model to the public that will, maybe, help people produce biological weapons or mass-produce child porn or who knows what else. This is an insane situation. Truly insane. Our current nonexistent regulatory apparatus around AI is similar to having just invented nuclear weapons and not yet having written any rules about who can make them or what they can do with them. There should be, at minimum, a robustly funded independent government agency that evaluates and regulates AI models before they are released into the world. Just for starters.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Feb 15

Crap like this is why I'm suspicious of exhortations to take AI "seriously" — because it's so often a euphemism for "you must use these products, force kids to use these products, and you're a rube if you resist in any way" techcrunch.com/2026/02/15/t...

The transition hasn’t been smooth everywhere. When I spoke with UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts in October, he described a spectrum — some faculty “leaning forward” with AI, others with “their heads in the sand.” Roberts, a former finance executive who arrived from outside academia, was pushing hard for AI integration despite faculty resistance. A week earlier, UNC had announced it would merge two schools to create an AI-focused entity — a decision that drew faculty pushback. Roberts had also appointed a vice provost specifically for AI. “No one’s going to say to students after they graduate, ‘Do the best job you can, but if you use AI, you’ll be in trouble,’” Roberts told me. “Yet we have faculty members effectively saying that right now.”

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Feb 14

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha no

pop up message in Venmo urging users to “Fund your Kalshi account with Venmo”

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Feb 4

goddamn

I remember something Alan Moore told me: “It is so important to reenchant these places that we live in, to actually give back the energies that have been bled out of them. An empowered landscape creates empowered people, and the reverse is also true. A disempowered landscape, stripped of its history, stripped of its meaning, will produce people who are stripped of their history, of their meaning. So yes, if magic is anything, it has to be political.”

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jan 26

the daily beast has thoughts about a former reporter archive.ph/TJIdJ

Dokoupil, his MS Now anchor wife Katy Tur, and their two children live in a three-story townhouse in one of Brooklyn’s most exclusive enclaves.
Dokoupil, a former Daily Beast reporter, attended a $53,000 prep school in Florida, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University, where he enrolled in a PhD program but did not complete it.

Anthony Ha@anthonyha· Jan 1

goddammit