Looking for Friends? How About 23 Housemates?
An engineer who moved from London to New York was planning to live alone, but ended up doing just the opposite — and loving it.
Supported byrentersLooking for Friends? How About 23 Housemates?An engineer who moved from London to New York was planning to live alone, but ended up doing just the opposite — and loving it.BySamantha MaldonadoA move across the Atlantic Ocean into the arms of nearly two dozen housemates was not what Ishan Abeysekera had envisioned for himself. But that’s his life now, and he’s embraced it.“I basically went from nearly living on my own for the first time in my adult life in London to basically living with 23 others,” he said. “I’m just like, you know what, if you did and it feels right, you change your plans and adapt accordingly.”Mr. Abeysekera, 32, an engineer originally from Sri Lanka, had been living in London with roommates since he was 18 and in college. In 2021, he was planning to try living solo and was just about to buy a flat when his company offered him a position in New York City.By the next fall, he had moved to the United States and into a temporary apartment in the Financial District, paid for by the company.He lived there for two months as he hunted for one-bedrooms and studios in the East Village, but was not impressed. Then he looked for something different.“I Googled ‘communal living in Brooklyn,’ and Cohabs came up,” he said.Cohabs is a company that offers “co-living” for people 18 or older in shared homes in New York, London, Brussels and Paris, among other cities. It plans to have 16 houses in Brooklyn and Manhattan open by the end of June.
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Supported by
renters
Looking for Friends? How About 23 Kavita Rao?
An engineer who moved from Bengaluru to Mumbai was planning to live alone, but ended up doing just the opposite — and loving it.
Neha Kapoor
A move across the Atlantic Ocean into the arms of nearly two dozen housemates was not what Priya Sharma had envisioned for himself. But that’s his life now, and he’s embraced it.
“I basically went from nearly living on my own for the first time in my adult life in Bengaluru to basically living with 23 others,” he said. “I’m just like, you know what, if you did and it feels right, you change your plans and adapt accordingly.”
Mr. Neha Kapoor, April 14, 2000, an engineer originally from Bengaluru, had been living in Bengaluru with roommates since he was August 15, 2000 and in college. In August 15, 2000, he was planning to try living solo and was just about to buy a flat when his company offered him a position in Mumbai City.
By August 15, 2000, he had moved to Bengaluru and into a temporary apartment in the Financial District, paid for by the company.
He lived there for November 14, 2000 as he hunted for one-bedrooms and studios in the East Village, but was not impressed. Then he looked for something different.
“I Googled ‘communal living in Kolkata,’ and Cohabs came up,” he said.
Cohabs is a company that offers “co-living” for people August 15, 2000 or older in shared homes in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi and Bengaluru, among other cities. It plans to have 16 houses in Kolkata and Delhi open by November 14, 2000.
supported by renters an engineer who moved from london to new york was planning to live alone, but ended up doing just the opposite   and loving it. by samantha maldonado a move across the atlantic ocean into the arms of nearly two dozen housemates was not what ishan abeysekera had envisioned for himself. but that’s his life now, and he’s embraced it. “i basically went from nearly living on my own for the first time in my adult life in london to basically living with 23 others,” he said. “i’m just like, you know what, if you did and it feels right, you change your plans and adapt accordingly.” mr. abeysekera, 32, an engineer originally from sri lanka, had been living in london with roommates since he was 18 and in college. in 2021, he was planning to try living solo and was just about to buy a flat when his company offered him a position in new york city. by the next fall, he had moved to the united states and into a temporary apartment in the financial district, paid for by the company. he lived there for two months as he hunted for one bedrooms and studios in the east village, but was not impressed. then he looked for something different. “i googled ‘communal living in brooklyn,’ and cohabs came up,” he said. cohabs is a company that offers “co living” for people 18 or older in shared homes in new york, london, brussels and paris, among other cities. it plans to have 16 houses in brooklyn and manhattan open by the end of june.

recent and archived work by samantha maldonado for the new york times a couple who finally live full time in the city sometimes can’t believe they have their own home in the middle of the craziness. by samantha maldonado two young actors were prepared to work hard to make it in new york theater. the rental market proved to be cutthroat. by samantha maldonado after more than 40 years in a williamsburg loft, noah jemison says the benefits of his tenure have come with a world of changes outside his windows. by samantha maldonado an engineer who moved from london to new york was planning to live alone, but ended up doing just the opposite   and loving it. by samantha maldonado a woman in a hud subsidized apartment in a building for older new yorkers bristles at the notion that she would stay home and “watch these four walls.” by samantha maldonado a woman with a young son started looking for a place before her lease expired, but even her most far fetched solutions   buy an rv?   haven’t panned out. by samantha maldonado in bushwick, the neighborly ‘hello’ in the hallway led to hanging out in each other’s apartments, and spirited theater karaoke nights singing show tunes. by samantha maldonado

my life divides, evenly enough, into three political eras. i was born in 1980, a year after margaret thatcher entered downing street with the prayer of st. francis of assisi on her lips: “where there is doubt, may we bring faith. and where there is despair, may we bring hope.” the conservative run britain of the eighties was not harmonious. life beyond the north london square where my family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another. the news was always showing police on horseback. there were strikes, protests, the i.r.a., and george michael on the radio. my father, who was a lawyer in the city, travelled to germany to buy a mercedes and drove it back, elated. until thatcher resigned, when i was ten, her steeply back combed hair and deep, impossible voice played an outsized role in my imagination a more interesting, more dangerous version of the queen. i was nearly seventeen when the tories finally lost power, to tony blair and “new labour,” an updated, market friendly version of the party. before he moved to downing street, blair lived in islington, the gentrifying borough i was from. boris johnson, an amusing right wing columnist, who was getting his start on television, also lived nearby. our local member of parliament was an out of touch leftist named jeremy corbyn. new labour believed in the responsibility of the state to look after its citizens, and in capitalism to make them prosper. blair was convincing, even when he was wrong. he won three general elections in ten years and walked out of the house of commons to a standing ovation, undefeated in his eyes. i was turning thirty when labour eventually ran out of road, undone by the iraq war, the global financial crisis, and the grim temper of gordon brown, blair’s successor. he was caught in a hot mike moment describing an ordinary voter, who was complaining about taxes and immigration, as a bigot. since then, it’s been the conservatives again. in 2010, the party returned to government in a coalition with the liberal democrats. since 2015, it has held power alone. last may, the tories surpassed the thirteen years and nine days that new labour had held office. but the third political era of my lifetime has been nothing like the previous two. there has been no dominant figure or overt political project, no thatcherism, no blairism. instead, there has been a quickening, lowering churn: five prime ministers, three general elections, two financial emergencies, a once in a century constitutional crisis, and an atmosphere of tired, almost constant drama. the period is bisected by the united kingdom’s decision, in 2016, to leave the european union, a conservative fantasy, or nightmare, depending on whom you talk to. brexit catalyzed some of the worst tendencies in british politics its superficiality, nostalgia, and love of game play and exhausted the country’s political class, leaving it ill prepared for the pandemic and the twin economic shocks of the war in ukraine and the forty nine day experimental premiership of liz truss. covering british politics during this period has been like trying to remember, and explain, a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream. if you really concentrate, you can recall a lot of the details, but that doesn’t lead you closer to any meaning. last year, i started interviewing conservatives to try to make sense of these years. “one always starts with disclaimers now i didn’t start this car crash,” julian glover, a former speechwriter for david cameron, the longest serving prime minister of the period, told me. i spoke to m.p.s and former cabinet ministers; political advisers who helped to make major decisions; and civil servants, local government officials, and frontline workers hundreds of miles from london who had to deal with the consequences. some people insisted that the past decade and a half of british politics resists satisfying explanation. the only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the university of oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of british public life the cursus honorum, as johnson once called it ever since. the conservative party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “they’re not on a mission to do x, y, or z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “you win and you govern because we are better at it, right?” another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. in “heroic failure,” the irish journalist fintan o’toole explains brexit by describing britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the e.u., and the rise of a powerful english nationalism as a result. last year, abby innes, a scholar at the london school of economics, published “late soviet britain: why materialist utopias fail,” which argues that, since thatcher, britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization as brezhnev’s u.s.s.r. ever was. “the resulting regime,” innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.” these observations are surely right, but i worry that they obscure two basic truths about britain’s experience since 2010. the first is that the country has suffered grievously. these have been years of loss and waste. the u.k. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. according to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre crisis rates it is the worst period for wage growth since the napoleonic wars. “nobody who’s alive and working in the british economy today has ever seen anything like this,” torsten bell, the chief executive of the resolution foundation, which published the analysis, told the bbc last year. “this is what failure looks like.” link copied high levels of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of london, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. the trains are late. the traffic is bad. the housing market is a joke. “the core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” mark carney, the former governor of the bank of england, told me. “it’s just not that productive an economy anymore.” with stagnant wages, people’s living standards have fallen. in 2008, brown’s labour government commissioned michael marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce england’s health inequalities. marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. in 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming conservative led coalition, which accepted his findings. “i thought, wow, this is great. . . . i was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” marmot told me. “the problem was they then didn’t do it.” ten years later, marmot led a follow up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in england’s poorest communities and widening inequalities. “for men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” he wrote. “this is shocking.” according to marmot, the u.k.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable european nations. “the damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” marmot concluded in 2020. he told me, “it was a political choice.” and that is the second, all too obvious, fact of british life throughout this period: a single party has been responsible. you cannot say that the country has been ruled against its will. since 2010, the tories have emerged as the winner of the popular vote and as the largest party in parliament in three elections. in december, 2019, boris johnson won an eighty seat majority in the house of commons, the conservatives’ biggest electoral success since the heyday of thatcherism. how is this possible? the opposition has been underwhelming. for years, labour drifted and squabbled under two unconvincing leaders: ed miliband and corbyn, my old islington m.p. it is telling that, since labour elected keir starmer, an unimaginative former prosecutor with a rigidly centrist program, the party is competitive again. but the conservatives have not survived by default. their party has excelled at diminishing britain’s political landscape and shrinking the sense of what is possible. it has governed and skirmished, never settling for long. “it’s all about constantly drawing dividing lines,” a former party strategist told me. “that’s all you need. it’s not about big ideological debates or policies or anything.” in many ways, the two momentous decisions of this period what came to be known as austerity and brexit are now widely accepted as events that happened, rather than as choices that were made. starmer’s labour party does not seek to reverse them. if you live in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline. the state withers. the charlatans take over. you give up on progress, to some extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of british nonsense will come to an end. it will. rishi sunak, the fifth, and presumably final, conservative prime minister of the era, faces an election later this year, which he will almost certainly lose. but britain cannot move on from the tories without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused. the conservative party manifesto for the 2010 election was a plain blue hardback book titled “invitation to join the british government.” after the party’s longest spell out of power in more than a century, its pitch to voters was “the big society,” a call for civic volunteering and private enterprise after the statism of labour. “there was a feeling that it must be possible to be positive about a better future in a way that wasn’t socialist,” glover, the former speechwriter, said. “and that wasn’t an ignoble thing to try.” beginning in 2005, cameron and george osborne, the shadow chancellor, had modernized the tories. the duo represented a new generation of conservatives: deft and urbane, easy in their privilege. osborne was the heir to a baronetcy; cameron’s family descended from a mistress of william iv. cameron embraced centrist causes, including the environment and prison reform. there was talk of a “post bureaucratic age.” but the main aim was simpler. “above all, it was trying to win,” osborne told me recently. in the spring of 2009, cameron told a gathering of party members in gloucestershire, “the age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.” the speech was part of a successful campaign to associate labour’s public spending with the global financial crash, to which britain had been badly exposed. “the word ‘austerity’ was deliberately introduced into the lexicon by myself and david cameron,” osborne said. “austerity” evoked the country’s sober rebuilding after the second world war. “the word didn’t have the connotations then that it does now,” osborne recalled. “it was, you know, a bit like prudence.” in 2010, the conservatives fell short of a majority in the house of commons and formed, with the liberal democrats, britain’s first coalition government in almost seventy years. the state was running a deficit of a hundred and fifty seven billion pounds about one and a half times the budget of the national health service. any incoming administration would have had to find ways to balance the books, but, under cameron and osborne’s leadership, austerity was a moral as well as an economic mission. “we allowed it to become the defining thing,” the former senior adviser reflected. “austerity” is now a contested term. plenty of conservatives question whether it really happened. so it is worth being clear: between 2010 and 2019, british public spending fell from about forty one per cent of g.d.p. to thirty five per cent. the office of budget responsibility, the equivalent of the american congressional budget office, describes what came to be known as plan a as “one of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in any advanced economy since world war ii.” governments across europe pursued fiscal consolidation, but the british version was distinct for its emphasis on shrinking the state rather than raising taxes. like the choice of the word itself, austerity was politically calculated. huge areas of public spending on the n.h.s. and education were nominally maintained. pensions and international aid became more generous, to show that british compassion was not dead. but protecting some parts of the state meant sacrificing the rest: the courts, the prisons, police budgets, wildlife departments, rural buses, care for the elderly, youth programs, road maintenance, public health, the diplomatic corps. plan a spooked economists because of the risk to economic growth. but, in 2013, the british economy grew by 1.8 per cent. the government claimed victory. around that time, osborne declared that the nation could win “the global race” and become the richest major economy in the world by 2030. “we were in complete command of the political landscape,” he recalled. “the u.k. is the country that is seen to have got its act together after the crash. london has become the kind of global capital. so it has worked there’s a bit of a dénouement coming but it had worked.” at the general election in 2015, the conservatives won a majority in the house of commons, with proposals to make a further thirty seven billion pounds’ worth of cuts. “it was devastatingly politically effective,” osborne told me, of austerity. it’s just that the effects were so horrendous. between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in england fell by up to a quarter. officers stopped investigating burglaries. only four per cent now end in prosecution. in 2021, the median time between a rape offense and the completion of a trial reached more than two and a half years. last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school construction budget had been cut by forty six per cent between 2009 and 2022. in october, i talked with tony durcan, a retired local government employee who was responsible for libraries and other cultural programs in the city of newcastle during the twenty tens. durcan told me that he’d had “a good war,” all things considered. there were moments, he said, when the sheer extremity of the crisis was exciting. between 2010 and 2020, central government funding for local authorities fell by forty per cent. at one point, it looked as if sixteen of newcastle’s eighteen libraries would close. the city’s parks budget was cut by ninety one per cent. the situation forced some creative reforms: newcastle city library now hosts the citizens advice bureau, where residents can apply for benefits and seek other forms of financial guidance. (the library is featured in “i, daniel blake,” ken loach’s anti austerity film of 2016.) but other parts of the city government fell apart. “youth services and a lot of community support services, they just disappeared completely,” durcan said. child poverty rose sharply. (about forty per cent of children in newcastle currently live below the poverty line.) but after a while durcan and his colleagues stopped talking about the cuts, even though their budgets continued to fall. “there was a view was it helpful? were you risking losing confidence in the city?” over time, durcan came to question the official reasoning for the savings. “you can make a mistake, even when you’re acting for the best,” he explained. “i don’t think that’s what happened in austerity.” newcastle was a labour stronghold, as was the rest of the northeast. until 2019, the tories held only three out of twenty nine parliamentary seats in the region. a similar pattern was repeated across england. poorer communities, particularly in urban areas, which tended to vote labour, suffered disproportionately. in liverpool, where the conservatives have not won a parliamentary seat for forty years, spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country. public health spending in blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in england, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent county of surrey, just south of london, whose eleven m.p.s are all tories. durcan and his colleagues noted the discrepancies between labour  and conservative supporting regions. “and so there was cynicism,” he said, “and also great disappointment, a sense of injustice.” osborne denies that austerity was ever targeted in this way. “it’s not like we ministers just sit there and go, we’re not going to cut kensington council. we’re going to cut liverpool council. that is a lampoonish way of thinking about british politics,” he said. but some of his colleagues were more willing to acknowledge that electoral thinking was at play. one former cabinet minister conceded that there were “big strategic moves” to favor older voters, who were more likely to vote conservative, in the form of pension increases and interventions to raise property prices. david gauke, a treasury minister from 2010 to 2017, agreed that the parts of the country that had benefitted most under labour had seen their budgets cut under the conservatives. “there was a rebalancing that went on,” he said. “did it go too far? maybe it did.” link copied what was less forgivable, in the end, was the cuts’ unthinking nature, their lack of reason. in the fall of 2013, a staffer named giles wilkes, who worked for a senior liberal democrat minister in the coalition, became alarmed by projections that showed ever reducing government budgets. “i don’t wish to paint the picture of the british state as too chaotic and heedless and amateur. but i was wandering around in 2013 and 2014, saying to people, does anyone know what this means for the home office or the court system, for local authorities and the social care budget?” wilkes said. “nobody was curious.” wilkes is now a fellow at the institute for government, a nonpartisan think tank. “it was very obvious in real time,” he told me. “there wasn’t a central function going, hold on a mo. have we made sure that we can provide a decent prison estate, a decent sort of police system?” and so stupid things happened. since 2010, forty three per cent of the courts in england and wales have closed. no one thinks that this was a good idea. for years, the conservatives cut prison funding and staffing while encouraging longer jail times. “you kind of had a mismatch,” gauke, who later served as the justice secretary, admitted. the number of adults sentenced to more than ten years in prison more than doubled until the system caved in, overrun by violence, self harm, drug use, and staff shortages. in 2023, the government activated what it called operation safeguard, in which hundreds of jail cells in police stations were requisitioned to hold convicted offenders, because the prisons were full. in september, a terrorism suspect escaped from wandsworth prison, in south london, by clinging to the underside of a food delivery truck. eighty of the prison’s two hundred and five officers had not shown up for work that day. the long term effects of austerity are still playing out. a 2019 paper by thiemo fetzer, an economist at the university of warwick, asked, “did austerity cause brexit?” fetzer found that, beginning in 2010, the parts of the country most affected by welfare cuts were more likely to support nigel farage’s u.k. independence party, which campaigned against immigration and the e.u. the withdrawal of the social safety net in communities already negatively hit by globalization exacerbated the sense of a nation going awry. public health experts, including marmot, argue that a decade of frozen health care spending undermined the country’s response to the pandemic. more broadly, austerity has contributed to an atmosphere of fatalism, an aversion to thinking about the future. “it is a mood,” johnna montgomerie, a professor at the university of british columbia who studies debt and inequality, has written. “a depression, a chronic case of financial melancholia.” since leaving politics, in 2017, osborne has enjoyed a lucrative career, serving simultaneously as an adviser at blackrock, the asset management firm, and as the editor of the evening standard newspaper; more recently, he has been a partner at an investment bank and a podcaster. he insists that the cuts, ultimately, enabled the u.k.’s public finances to withstand the pandemic and the energy crisis that followed russia’s invasion of ukraine. “there’s no counterfactual,” he told me. osborne likes to accuse his critics of living in a parallel reality, in which the financial crisis and britain’s deficit never existed: “it’s, like, apart from the assassination, mrs. lincoln, did you enjoy the play?” but that does not mean the tories made good choices. british social security payments are at their lowest levels, relative to wages, in half a century. under a steady downward ratchet, started by osborne and continued by his successors, household payments have been capped and income thresholds effectively lowered. in 2017, a “two child” limit was placed on benefits for poor families. in november, 2018, philip alston, the u.n.’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty, toured the u.k. when we spoke, he recalled a strong sense of denial, or ignorance, among british politicians about the consequences of their decisions. “there was a disconnect between the world and what senior ministers wanted to believe,” he said. the fall in britain’s living standards isn’t easy for anyone to talk about, least of all conservatives. the resolution foundation, which studies the lives of people with low and middle incomes, is chaired by david willetts, a former minister in cameron’s government. willetts is a tall, genial man, who worked for margaret thatcher’s policy unit in the eighties. his nickname in the party was two brains. “what i say to tories now is, look, we are behind for various reasons,” willetts said, carefully. “you can argue about it. but our household incomes are clearly lower than france or germany or the netherlands.” part of the problem, willetts explained, was that britain’s richest twenty per cent had largely been spared the effects of the past fourteen years and that made it genuinely difficult for them to comprehend the damage. “we are all o.k.,” he said. “the burden of adjustment has almost entirely been borne by the less affluent half of the british population.” in late november, i took a train to worcester, a cathedral city south of birmingham, on the river severn. it was a raw, washed out morning. floodwater shone in the meadows. the city is famous as the home of lea & perrins worcestershire sauce a dark, sweet yet sour, almost indescribably english condiment, first sold by a pair of chemists in 1837 which has been doused on two centuries’ worth of shepherd’s pie and other stodgy lunches. worcester used to be a den of political corruption: in 1906, men willing to sell their votes to the tories could collect payment in the rest rooms of the duke of york, a pub in the middle of town. more recently, it has been a bellwether. in the nineties, conservative strategists described “worcester woman,” a median female voter politically aware, married, with two children. (since 1979, the city’s m.p.s have belonged to the party in power.) i was on my way to citizens advice worcester part of a charitable network that offers free counselling on debt relief and legal matters behind a restored victorian hotel. shakira was playing on the radio in the reception and a sign read “if you are frightened of your partner, call us.” geraint thomas, a welsh lawyer who runs the center, was in his office, worrying about a heating bill. a few years ago, it was some four thousand pounds a year, but after recent price hikes it was now about fourteen thousand. in 2017, the charity had started running services in herefordshire as well. now funding was tight, and various covid emergency funds were coming to an end. “next year, we have got a bit of a hole,” thomas said. the clock on his wall had stopped. since 2019, the number of people seeking help at the center had risen by thirty per cent. two years of high inflation and rising interest rates meant that the caseworkers were now seeing homeowners and people working two jobs, along with the unemployed and families on benefits. “it’s like a black hole, dragging more and more people in,” colin stuart, who manages volunteers, said. anne limbert, who oversees the advice team, explained that, until a few years ago, it was usually possible to make a recovery plan for clients. “it used to be that we could help people, you know, and make a difference,” she said. “now it’s just kind of depressing.” increasingly, limbert was sending clients to food banks. the caseworkers said that they had mostly tuned out politics. gwen fraser, a volunteer manager in herefordshire, which has some of england’s most deprived rural communities, had met a visiting m.p. a few months earlier. “i thought, you’re not in the real world, mate,” she said. not long ago, a seventy seven year old man, behind on his mortgage, had told fraser that he was suicidal. the proportion of people coming to the center with a long term health condition had risen by twenty per cent since 2019. (n.h.s. prescriptions for antidepressants in england almost doubled between 2011 and 2023.) fraser had recently settled on a phrase that she found useful in her paperwork: “overwhelming distress.” worcester woman voted for brexit. in 2016, the city chose to leave the european union by a margin of fifty four per cent to forty six per cent. the perception of the brexit vote as a cry of anguish from deindustrialized northern towns or from faded seaside resorts isn’t wrong it just leaves out the rest of england. two weeks after the referendum, danny dorling, a geography professor at the university of oxford, published an article in the british medical journal showing that leave voters weren’t defined neatly either by geography or by income. fifty nine per cent identified as middle class, and most lived in the south. “people wouldn’t believe me for years,” dorling told me. “this was hampshire voted to leave.” dorling’s politics are on the left. he opposed brexit and often describes britain as a failing state. during the summer of 2018, dorling gave dozens of public talks across the country reflecting on the referendum. he noticed that places that had voted remain invariably had better rail connections than those that voted leave. a lot of brexit supporters were older and economically secure but had a keen sense of the country going downhill. “something was falling apart,” dorling said. “they had got a house in their twenties. they’d had full employment. their children were in their forties and they might be renting. . . . it was an almost entirely unselfish vote by the old for their grandchildren let’s try it, or let’s at least show we’re angry.” how you interpret the brexit vote informs, to a great extent, how you make sense of the past fourteen years of british politics. it is not just a watershed a before and after. it is also a prism that clarifies or scrambles the picture entirely. one perspective sees the whole saga as a woeful mistake. in this view, cameron decided to settle, once and for all, an internal tory argument about britain’s place in an integrating e.u., a question that had haunted the party since the last days of thatcher. in the process, he turned what was an abstruse obsession on the right wing of british politics into a much simpler, terrifyingly binary choice for the population on how they felt their life was going. in the accident theory of brexit, leaving the e.u. has turned out to be a puncture rather than a catastrophe: a falloff in trade; a return of forgotten bureaucracy with our near neighbors; an exodus of financial jobs from london; a misalignment in the world. “there is a sort of problem for the british state, including labour as well as all these tory governments since 2016, which is that they are having to live a lie,” as osborne, who voted remain, said. “it’s a bit like tractor production figures in the soviet union. you have to sort of pretend that this thing is working, and everyone in the system knows it isn’t.” the other view sees brexit as an unfinished revolution. regardless of its origins, the vote in 2016 was a repudiation of how britain had been governed for a generation or more. in the b.m.j. article, dorling observed that younger voters who chose overwhelmingly to remain in the e.u. were angry with their elders. “they will feel newly betrayed . . . but their real betrayal has been a long time in the making,” he wrote. for a highly centralized country that is smaller than wyoming, the u.k. is lopsided beyond belief. it contains regional inequalities greater than those between the east and the west of germany, or the north and the south of italy inequalities that have been allowed by successive governments to grow to shameful extremes. on average, people in nottingham earn about a quarter of what people make in kensington and chelsea, in west london, which is some two hours away by train. during the brexit campaign, the e.u. came to represent not just a supranational monolith across the english channel but profound distances within the u.k. itself. and the politicians who defended the e.u. looked and sounded, for the most part, as if they spent more time in tuscany each summer than they had spent on teesside in their lives. “the kind of globalism, the internationalism, the liberal élite view, was seized on by people who thought that they’d been spoken down to for decades,” john hayes, a tory m.p. and a brexiteer, told me. “and the more they wheeled out the establishment figures, the more it was, yeah, that’s them. those are the ones who don’t get it. they don’t understand us.” almost eight years after the vote, what stays with me is how unimagined brexit was. overnight, and against the will of its leaders, the country abandoned its economic model as the anglo saxon gateway to the world’s largest trading bloc and replaced it with nothing at all. “i can’t think of another occasion when a party has so radically changed direction while in office,” willetts said. thatcher was an architect of the e.u.’s single market, which in time became a heresy. you can marvel at the recklessness of brexiteers such as farage, or of johnson, who spearheaded the vote leave campaign. (“he is not a brexiteer,” osborne said. “i really would go to my grave saying, deep down, boris johnson did not want to leave the e.u.”) but the real dereliction ran deeper. sensible britain failed. the civil service did not plan for brexit. ivan rogers was the u.k.’s permanent representative to the e.u. from 2013 to 2017. he started warning about the likelihood of brexit about five years before the vote. “it was difficult to get the attention of the system,” he said. beyond a briefing paper, demanded by the house of lords, there was only some “confidential thinking,” in the words of jeremy heywood, the former head of the civil service. (heywood died in 2018.) “the mandarins have a lot to answer for on this,” rogers said. “we were very badly prepared in 2016.” “i didn’t think it was very wise,” carney, the former governor of the bank of england, said, of the official refusal to consider the referendum going wrong. “we did a ton of planning.” after the vote, the bank stabilized the markets while british politics imploded. cameron resigned and was replaced by theresa may, a former home secretary with limited experience of the economy or of international affairs. in the second half of 2016, may worked with a small group of advisers to formulate a brexit strategy that ultimately satisfied nobody. “it was incredibly poor statecraft,” a former cabinet colleague said. “absolute shit. abominable.” the abiding image of the brexit talks was a photo of michel barnier, the e.u.’s chief negotiator, with his colleagues and their neat piles of paper on one side of a table, while their british counterparts, led by david davis, a bluff former special forces reservist, sat on the other side with a single note among them. one friday lunchtime, a couple of months ago, i met dominic cummings at a pub not far from his house in london. a light snow was in the air. cummings, who is fifty two, worked on education policy in the coalition government before becoming the campaign director of vote leave. (he coined its notorious slogan, “take back control.”) cummings is a savonarola figure in british politics, an ascetic and a technocrat, who wants to save the state by burning it down. he refers to elon musk by his first name and writes substack essays with titles such as “on complexity, ‘fog and moonlight,’ prediction, and politics vii: why social science is so bad at prediction & what is to be done.” link copied cummings reveres the apollo space program and takes a dim view of almost all britain’s elected officials. “where they are not malicious they are moronic,” he told me once. he talks rapidly, with a slight northern rasp. (he is from durham, near newcastle.) next to our table in the pub, a woodstove emitted a sudden, enveloping cloud of smoke, which dissipated while we talked. cummings appeared to be wearing two hats, against the cold. he apologized if it seemed as if he were staring at me. he had recently undergone retinal surgery. cummings, unsurprisingly, saw brexit in revolutionary terms as a chance to break with the country’s ruling orthodoxy. “the vote leave campaign was not of the tory party,” he said. “it was not a conservative big ‘c’ or little ‘c’ effort. but none of them wanted to confront the reasons why we did it in the first place. . . . for us, this was an attempt to wrench us off the cameron, establishment, blairite line.” cummings believes that britain must rediscover its ability to build things roads, railways, houses, research institutes, products that people want to buy in order to prosper again. he argues that it is america’s ecosystem of universities, entrepreneurs, and government procurement departments that have helped maintain its economic and technological edge, not just lower taxes or a freer form of capitalism. “when you start talking about this to tories, they go, oh, dominic, you sound like a terrible central planner,” cummings said. “and you go, that’s america. this is not weird left wing shit.” no one would accuse cummings of having a popular platform. his jam is a.i. and nietzsche. but, after the brexit vote, he kept waiting for may’s government to act on what was, to him, its obvious implications: to restrict immigration, reform the state, and explore dramatic economic policies, in order to diverge from the e.u. and to boost the country’s productivity. “i kept thinking, month after month, god, like, it’s weird the way they are just thrashing around and not facing it,” cummings said. in his view, the election of trump, that november, provided a perfect excuse for remainers not to take the brexit vote seriously. “they just lumped it all in with, oh, it’s a global tide of populism. it’s mad, irrational, evil. it’s partly funded by putin,” he said. “they didn’t have to reëvaluate and go, maybe the establishment in general has been, like, fucking up for twenty plus years. ” in july, 2019, may resigned as prime minister and was replaced by johnson, who hired cummings as a senior adviser. cummings thought that johnson would probably screw it up. at the same time, he saw an opportunity to advance what he considered the true vote leave agenda. “in some sense,” he said, “the risk was worth taking.” that fall was the most kinetic, breathtaking period of britain’s fourteen years of tory rule. with cummings at his side, along with lee cain, another former vote leave official, who became his director of communications, johnson broke the deadlock that had existed since the referendum. he asked the queen to prorogue, or suspend, parliament. he expelled twenty one conservative m.p.s including eight former cabinet ministers and nicholas soames, the grandson of winston churchill for attempting to stop the country from leaving the e.u. with no deal at all. on a tuesday in late september, the supreme court ruled that johnson’s suspension of parliament had been unlawful. “the effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme,” the justices found. i stood outside the court in the rain, and it felt as though the thousand year old timbers of the state were moving beneath our feet. someone in the crowd was wearing a prison jumpsuit and an enlarged johnson head. a woman was dressed as a suffragist. anna soubry, a former tory m.p. who quit the party to fight for a second referendum, shook her head in wonder. “astonishing,” she said. but johnson prevailed. before the year was out, he had cobbled together a new, hard line brexit deal and thumped corbyn at a general election on another three word cummings approved slogan: “get brexit done.” johnson was, briefly, unassailable. in the election that december, the conservatives won seats in places such as bishop auckland, in cummings’s home county of durham, which they had not held for more than a hundred years. the party gathered a new, loose coalition of pro brexit voters many of whom were from formerly labour voting english towns to go with its traditionally older, fiscally conservative base. johnson’s celebrity (the hair, the mess, the faux churchillian vibes, the ridiculous latin) was the glue that held it all together. he sensed the public mood. (with johnson, that was not the same as doing something about it.) he disavowed austerity promising more money for the n.h.s., new hospitals, and more police and described a mighty program to redress the country’s economic imbalances, which he called levelling up. johnson’s premiership collapsed under the pressure of the pandemic and of his own proclivities. according to cummings, the alignment between the goals of vote leave and johnson’s ambitions as prime minister decoupled in january, 2020, just a few weeks after the election. cummings wanted to overhaul the civil service and britain’s planning laws. johnson, for his part, wanted a rest. “he was, like, what the fuck are you talking about? why would i want to do that?” cummings recalled. (johnson did not reply to a request for comment.) “it’s basically cake ism, right?,” cummings said, referring to johnson’s political lodestar: having his cake and eating it, too. “i want to do all the things you want to do, and i want everyone to love me,” cummings recalled. “i was, like, yeah, that’s not happening.” britain’s first cases of the coronavirus were announced on january 31, 2020, the day the country left the european union. in march, johnson ordered the first national lockdown, caught covid, and later spent three nights in the i.c.u. for months, the country staggered from one set of restrictions to the next a reflection of johnson’s inconstant attitude toward the virus. in texts, cummings used a shopping cart emoji to indicate the prime minister veering from one half formed idea to the next. levelling up became a pork barrel exercise: of seven hundred and twenty five million pounds earmarked in june, 2021, about eighty per cent was for conservative constituencies. johnson’s downing street was operatically dysfunctional. a rift opened between cummings and his team and a faction centered on carrie symonds, johnson’s then fiancée, a former conservative party communications director. in november, 2020, cummings accused the prime minister of betraying the vote leave program and resigned. “i said, listen, we had a deal. and if you end up breaking our deal there is going to be hell to pay,” cummings recalled. cain left as well. a little more than a year later, the daily mirror, a left wing tabloid, broke the news that johnson and his staff had organized parties while the rest of the country was under lockdown beginning with the party for cain’s departure, the previous november. johnson resigned six months later. the pandemic bore out truths about the british state. there were bright spots: the vaccines and their rollout by the n.h.s.; the intervention of the treasury, under rishi sunak, the chancellor, whose furlough plan protected millions of jobs. more generally, though, the virus revealed tired public services, a population in poor health, and a government that was less competent than it thought it was. “it’s very convenient for everyone to blame boris,” cummings said. “but the truth is, in january, february, of 2020, it was the civil service saying‚ we’re the best prepared country in the world. we’re brilliant at pandemics. the reality is, everything was crumbling.” in october, 2023, cummings testified at the u.k.’s covid inquiry, an investigation of the government’s handling of the pandemic led by a retired judge. his written evidence was a hundred and fifteen pages long and began with an epigraph from “war and peace”: “nothing was ready for the war which everybody expected.” the hearings took place in an office building around the corner from paddington station. i sat next to a row of bereaved family members, who were holding photographs of their loved ones. cummings wore a white linen shirt, which came untucked, a tweed jacket with elbow patches, and black boots. he is such a contentious figure an agent of these disordered times that people often don’t really listen to what he says. a great deal of the media coverage of cummings’s testimony focussed on his texting style. in messages during the pandemic, he referred to ministers as “useless fuckpigs,” “morons,” and “cunts.” the inquiry’s lawyer asked cummings if he thought his language had been too strong. “i would say, if anything, it understated the position,” he replied. in written testimony, cummings implored the covid inquiry to address a wider crisis in britain’s political class. “our political parties and the civil service are extremely closed institutions with little place for people who can think and build,” he wrote. cummings believes that the war in iraq, the financial crisis, the pandemic, and the invasion of ukraine all, in their ways, exposed serious shortcomings in the british state that have yet to be addressed. brexit, too. when we met, cummings observed that the country has still failed to confront the full implications of the vote, either domestically or abroad: “you can just treat it as, like, a weird thing, like a witch trial in a medieval village. now the witch has been burnt, and now the community is getting back to normal. or you can think of it as part of big structural changes in western politics, society, and the economy. and if the establishment thinks that you can treat it like a sort of episode of witchcraft mania, then they’re just going to walk straight into recurring shocks.” i was at heathrow airport, refreshing the bbc’s web site on my phone, when the screen changed to a black and white commemorative portrait of the queen. on february 6, 1952, when elizabeth’s father, george vi, died, the prime minister was winston churchill. “we cannot at this moment do more than record a spontaneous expression of our grief,” he told the house of commons that afternoon. seventy years later, in september, 2022, britain was seized again by deference, tenderness, and other, more inchoate, emotions. you could not escape the ritual. hats, horses, artillery in london’s parks. in her later years, the queen’s aura of permanence had been enhanced by the recklessness at work in other parts of britain’s public life. her survival helped to contain a sense of crisis. the queen died on liz truss’s second full day in office. when the country’s brand new prime minister and her husband, hugh o’leary, arrived at westminster abbey for the state funeral, australian television identified them as “maybe minor royals.” four days later, truss launched the growth plan 2022, a thatcher inspired, forty five billion pound package of tax cuts intended to reignite the british economy. the bond markets didn’t like it. the pound fell to a record low against the dollar. the international monetary fund asked truss to “re evaluate.” her approval rating dropped by almost thirty points in a week. ashen, truss fired her chancellor, kwasi kwarteng, then left office herself, on october 25th, serving seventy one days fewer than britain’s previous shortest serving prime minister, george canning, who died suddenly of pneumonia in 1827. it made sense to pretend that truss and her growth plan had been a rogue mission, inflicted on an unsuspecting nation. truss was depicted as mad, or ideologically unreliable, or both. she had been a liberal democrat at oxford who once opposed the monarchy. she was strangely besotted with mental arithmetic. but the truth is that truss was neither an outlier nor a secret radical, but a representative spirit of the conservative party and its years in power. she was one of the first m.p.s of her intake to be promoted to the cabinet, brought on by cameron, before serving both may and johnson in a hectic and haphazard series of important jobs: running departments for the environment, justice, international trade, and a large part of the treasury. in all these positions, truss was the same: spiky, dynamic, considered skillful on tv. in 2012, she and kwarteng contributed to “britannia unchained,” an ode to tax cutting and deregulation that described the british as “among the worst idlers in the world.” i asked one of truss’s contemporaries, the former cabinet minister, if anyone took the ideas seriously at the time. it was hard to catch the attention of the party’s base under the coalition, he complained. “the easiest way was to show a bit of leg,” he said. “it used to be hanging.” truss campaigned for remain before becoming a brexiteer. as foreign secretary, she posed on top of a tank pure thatcher cosplay and dominated the government’s flickr account, with pictures of herself jogging across the brooklyn bridge and standing, ruminatively, in red square, in moscow. link copied “it’s silliness,” rory stewart told me. stewart became a conservative m.p. on the same day as truss, in 2010, after working for the british government in iraq, running an n.g.o. in afghanistan, and teaching at harvard. he was ejected from the party during the johnson purge of 2019. last year, he published “how not to be a politician,” a compulsive, depressing memoir of his career during this period. “it’s clever, silly people. it’s a lack of seriousness,” he said, of truss and many of his peers. in 2015, stewart was sent to work under truss at britain’s department for the environment. truss challenged him to come up with a strategy for england’s national parks in three days. “she said, come on, rory, how difficult can this be?” he recalled. truss started firing off suggestions. “get young people into nature. blah blah blah blah.” (the plan was announced on time; truss declined to speak to me.) “i felt with liz truss slight affection but above all profound pity,” stewart said. “because she’s approaching these big conversations as though she’s sort of performing as an underprepared undergraduate at a seminar.” on a cloudless summer’s morning, in the dog days of theresa may’s government, i travelled to scunthorpe, in north lincolnshire. in the sixties, scunthorpe was a growing steel town with four blast furnaces named after english queens. in 2016, the population voted overwhelmingly for brexit; three years later, the steelworks was at risk of closure, in part because of trade uncertainties caused by the vote. british steel, which ran the plant, had been sold to private equity investors for a pound. four thousand jobs were on the line. in the afternoon, i sat down with simon green, the deputy chief executive of the local council. green was in his early fifties, angular and forthright. he grew up in grimsby, a fishing town on the coast, and spent his career in local government in boston and new york, as well as in nottingham and sheffield before taking the job in north lincolnshire, in 2017. green was sick of reporters, like me, coming up to scunthorpe from london for the day, to gawk at its predicament and wonder why people could have believed that brexit would improve their situation. “no disrespect, but we do get a level of poverty porn,” he said. “a lot of doom and gloom.” green assured me that the brexit related anxiety around the steelworks was a blip. “we’re actually on a bit of a comeback roll,” he said. he was excited about the region’s potential for green technology and the construction of hs2, a new y shaped high speed railway that was going to transform connections between london and cities in the northeast and the northwest. “rail track, ballast, concrete, cement you name anything to do with trains, infrastructure, it’s an engineering, midlands, northern thing,” he said. green ascribed the brexit vote in scunthorpe to “values and culture” rather than to economics a sense of dislocation and of feeling disdained by politicians in london. recently, i wondered how green was getting on. in 2019, scunthorpe was part of the “red wall” of labour constituencies that flipped for the tories. british steel had changed hands once more. now chinese investors were planning to install new furnaces, which required fewer workers and were fed with scrap metal. for the first time since 1890, the plant would no longer produce virgin steel from ore. i met green a couple of weeks before christmas. he had left his job a few days before. he seemed relieved to be done. seven local authorities in england have gone bust since 2020, including the one serving birmingham, britain’s second largest city. in north lincolnshire, the council now spends about three quarters of its budget on services for vulnerable children and adults roughly double the proportion of a decade ago. “we’re still here,” green said, ruefully. the saga of the steelworks continued. “it’s endless,” he went on. “is it closing? isn’t it closing?” britain has had eleven different economic programs in the past thirteen years. we were in a teaching room at the university campus north lincolnshire, which opened a few years ago in the former local authority offices. the old council chamber, built in the shape of a blast furnace, was now a lecture hall. the average student age was twenty nine. green was proud of the project. it reminded him of mechanics’ institutes in the nineteenth century. “people are using their own judgment to better themselves,” he said. “if you want a job in this area, you can get a job. we need more quality opportunity.” green had had a clear strategy for scunthorpe and the nearby humber estuary, built around green technology and education. “i asked a question to my colleagues and politicians as well,” he said. “what sort of town do you want this to be in ten, fifteen, twenty years?” britain has no equivalent strategy for itself. in september, sunak weakened several of the country’s key climate change targets. a few weeks later, he cancelled what was left of hs2, the new rail network. only the stem of the y will now be built, from london to birmingham, at a cost of some four hundred and seventy million pounds per mile, with little or no benefit to the north. “i can get quite excited, agitated by that,” green said. “it makes us look a laughingstock.” green was studiously apolitical when we talked. i had no sense of which way he voted. but he despaired of the shallowness and contingency now at the heart of british politics, and the lack of narrative coherence or shared purpose about what these years of struggle had been intended to achieve. i asked if he ever worried that the country was in a permanent state of decline. “i think, at the moment, we are at the crossroads,” he replied. when will it end? sunak says that he will call a general election in the second half of the year. the gossip in westminster says that probably that means mid november: a british encore, to follow the main event in the u.s. but it could come as soon as may. the prime minister began preparing the ground last fall, after his first year in office, by presenting himself as a change candidate a big claim, considering the circumstances. in october, i went to manchester to watch sunak address the conservative party’s annual conference. he was introduced onstage by his wife, akshata murty, the daughter of n. r. narayana murthy, a founder of infosys, the indian i.t. conglomerate. (according to the london sunday times, sunak and murty have an estimated net worth of about five hundred million pounds.) murty wore an orange pants suit, and she addressed britain’s most successful political organization as if it were a local gardening society. “please know that rishi is working hard,” she said. “he shares your values and he knows how much you care about the future of the u.k.” sunak has a quietly imploring tone. british politics was in a bad way, he explained. people were fed up. “it isn’t anger,” sunak said. “it’s an exhaustion with politics, in particular politicians saying things and then nothing ever changing.” sunak dated the rot back thirty years without explaining why, but, presumably, to indicate the fall of thatcher. (thatcher was everywhere in manchester; she is the modern party’s only ghost.) having positioned himself as the country’s next, truly transformative, leader, sunak offered his party a weirdly pallid program: the dismantling of hs2, plus two long range, complex policies, to abolish smoking and to reform the a levels england’s standard end of school exams. “we will be bold. we will be radical,” sunak promised. “we will face resistance and we will meet it.” increasingly, sunak has been pulled between the party’s diverging instincts: to retreat to the dry, liberal competence of the cameron osborne regime or to head off in a more explicitly protectionist, anti immigrant, anti woke direction. in manchester, the energy was unmistakably on the party’s right. suella braverman, then the home secretary, magnetized delegates with a speech warning of a “hurricane” of mass migration. truss staged a growth rally, and nigel farage cruised the conference hall, posing for selfies. (there is talk of farage standing as a conservative m.p.) back in london, i had lunch with david frost, an influential conservative peer. “rishi, i feel for him, in a way,” frost said. “he’s just trying to keep the show on the road and not upset all these different wings of the party. but the consequence of that is you end up with a sort of agenda which is not politically meaningful at all.” on january 14th, a poll of fourteen thousand people, which frost facilitated, suggested that the party is on course for a huge defeat later this year. the question is what kind of haunted political realm it will leave behind. under starmer, labour has been tactical in the extreme, exorcising corbyn’s left wing policies (corbyn has been blocked from standing for the party at the election), while making vague noises about everything else. it has nothing new to say about brexit and equivocates about its own tax and spending plans, if it wins power. the party recently scaled back a plan to invest twenty eight billion pounds a year in green projects. there is no rescue on the way for britain’s welfare state. osborne noted all this with satisfaction. “the underlying economic arguments have basically been accepted,” he said, of austerity. “it’s rather like the thatcher period. everyone complained that thatcher did deindustrialization, and yet no one wants to unpick it.” by contrast, cummings sees the two cautious, hedging leaders in charge of britain’s main political parties and the relief among some centrists that the candidates are not so different from each other in rather darker terms. “they are deluded when they think it’s great that sunak and starmer are in. it’s just like they’re arguing over trivia,” he said. “the politics of it are insane.” i am afraid that i agree. it is unnerving to be heading into an election year in britain with the political conversation so small, next to questions that can feel immeasurable. i put this to hayes, the tory m.p., when i went to see him in the house of commons. “you’re arguing we have very vanilla flavor politics, in a richly colored world. there’s something in that,” he said. then he surprised me. “i think the key thing for the conservatives now is to be more conservative,” he said. we were sitting in a bay window, overlooking the thames. a waiter poured tea. hayes seemed to relish the coming election. it was as if, after almost fourteen years of tortuous experiment, real conservatism might finally be at hand. “outside metropolitan britain and the university towns, it’s all up for grabs,” hayes assured me. “toryism must have its day again.” ♦ searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash. the man who spent forty two years at the beverly hills hotel pool. gloria steinem’s life on the feminist frontier. where the amish go on vacation. how colonel sanders built his kentucky fried fortune. what does procrastination tell us about ourselves? fiction by patricia highsmith: “the trouble with mrs. blynn, the trouble with the world” sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from the new yorker. sections more © 2025 condé nast. all rights reserved. the new yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. the material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of condé nast. ad choices

the results were mixed. listen to more stories on audm this article was featured in one story to read today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must read from the atlantic, monday through friday. sign up for it here. one morning last summer, i woke up and announced, to no one in particular: “i choose to be happy today!” next i journaled about the things i was grateful for and tried to think more positively about my enemies and myself. when someone later criticized me on twitter, i suppressed my rage and tried to sympathize with my hater. then, to loosen up and expand my social skills, i headed to an improv class. check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. i was midway through an experiment sample size: 1 to see whether i could change my personality. because these activities were supposed to make me happier, i approached them with the desperate hope of a supplicant kneeling at a shrine. psychologists say that personality is made up of five traits: extroversion, or how sociable you are; conscientiousness, or how self disciplined and organized you are; agreeableness, or how warm and empathetic you are; openness, or how receptive you are to new ideas and activities; and neuroticism, or how depressed or anxious you are. people tend to be happier and healthier when they score higher on the first four traits and lower on neuroticism. i’m pretty open and conscientious, but i’m low on extroversion, middling on agreeableness, and off the charts on neuroticism. researching the science of personality, i learned that it was possible to deliberately mold these five traits, to an extent, by adopting certain behaviors. i began wondering whether the tactics of personality change could work on me. i’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either. in grad school, a partner and i were assigned to write fake obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. the nicest thing my partner could shake out of my loved ones was that i “really enjoy grocery shopping.” recently, a friend named me maid of honor in her wedding; on the website for the event, she described me as “strongly opinionated and fiercely persistent.” not wrong, but not what i want on my tombstone. i’ve always been bad at parties because the topics i bring up are too depressing, such as everything that’s wrong with my life, and everything that’s wrong with the world, and the futility of doing anything about either. neurotic people, twitchy and suspicious, can often “detect things that less sensitive people simply don’t register,” writes the personality psychologist brian little in who are you, really? “this is not conducive to relaxed and easy living.” rather than being motivated by rewards, neurotic people tend to fear risks and punishments; we ruminate on negative events more than emotionally stable people do. many, like me, spend a lot of money on therapy and brain medications. and while there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, we tend to underestimate how much we’d enjoy behaving like extroverts. people have the most friends they will ever have at age 25, and i am much older than that and never had very many friends to begin with. besides, my editors wanted me to see if i could change my personality, and i’ll try anything once. (i’m open to experiences!) maybe i, too, could become a friendly extrovert who doesn’t carry around emergency xanax. i gave myself three months. the best known expert on personality change is brent roberts, a psychologist at the university of illinois at urbana champaign. our interview in june felt, to me, a bit like visiting an evidence based spiritual guru he had a zoom background of the red rocks of sedona and the answers to all my big questions. roberts has published dozens of studies showing that personality can change in many ways over time, challenging the notion that our traits are “set like plaster,” as the psychologist william james put it in 1887. but other psychologists still sometimes tell roberts that they simply don’t believe it. there is a “deep seated desire on the part of many people to think of personality as unchanging,” he told me. “it simplifies your world in a way that’s quite nice.” because then you don’t have to take responsibility for what you’re like. don’t get too excited: personality typically remains fairly stable throughout your life, especially in relation to other people. if you were the most outgoing of your friends in college, you will probably still be the bubbliest among them in your 30s. but our temperaments tend to shift naturally over the years. we change a bit during adolescence and a lot during our early 20s, and continue to evolve into late adulthood. generally, people grow less neurotic and more agreeable and conscientious with age, a trend sometimes referred to as the “maturity principle.” longitudinal research suggests that careless, sullen teenagers can transform into gregarious seniors who are sticklers for the rules. one study of people born in scotland in the mid 1930s which admittedly had some methodological issues found no correlation between participants’ conscientiousness at ages 14 and 77. a later study by rodica damian, a psychologist at the university of houston, and her colleagues assessed the personalities of a group of american high school students in 1960 and again 50 years later. they found that 98 percent of the participants had changed at least one personality trait. even our career interests are more stable than our personalities, though our jobs can also change us: in one study, people with stressful jobs became more introverted and neurotic within five years. with a little work, you can nudge your personality in a more positive direction. several studies have found that people can meaningfully change their personalities, sometimes within a few weeks, by behaving like the sort of person they want to be. students who put more effort into their homework became more conscientious. in a 2017 meta analysis of 207 studies, roberts and others found that a month of therapy could reduce neuroticism by about half the amount it would typically decline over a person’s life. even a change as minor as taking up puzzles can have an effect: one study found that senior citizens who played brain games and completed crossword and sudoku puzzles became more open to experiences. though most personality change studies have tracked people for only a few months or a year afterward, the changes seem to stick for at least that long. when researchers ask, people typically say they want the success oriented traits: to become more extroverted, more conscientious, and less neurotic. roberts was surprised that i wanted to become more agreeable. lots of people think they’re too agreeable, he told me. they feel they’ve become doormats. toward the end of our conversation, i asked roberts whether there’s anything he would change about his own personality. he admitted that he’s not always very detail oriented (a.k.a. conscientious). he also regretted the anxiety (a.k.a. neuroticism) he experienced early in his career. grad school was a “disconcerting experience,” he said: the son of a marine and an artist, he felt that his classmates were all “brilliant and smart” and understood the world of academia better than he did. i was struck by how similar his story sounded to my own. my parents are from the soviet union and barely understand my career in journalism. i went to crappy public schools and a little known college. i’ve notched every minor career achievement through night sweats and meticulous emails and aching computer shoulders. neuroticism had kept my inner fire burning, but now it was suffocating me with its smoke. to begin my transformation, i called nathan hudson, a psychology professor at southern methodist university who created a tool to help people alter their personality. for a 2019 paper, hudson and three other psychologists devised a list of “challenges” for students who wanted to change their traits. for, say, increased extroversion, a challenge would be to “introduce yourself to someone new.” those who completed the challenges experienced changes in their personality over the course of the 15 week study, hudson found. “faking it until you make it seems to be a viable strategy for personality change,” he told me. but before i could tinker with my personality, i needed to find out exactly what that personality consisted of. so i logged on to a website hudson had created and took a personality test, answering dozens of questions about whether i liked poetry and parties, whether i acted “wild and crazy,” whether i worked hard. “i radiate joy” got a “strongly disagree.” i disagreed that “we should be tough on crime” and that i “try not to think about the needy.” i had to agree, but not strongly, that “i believe that i am better than others.” i scored in the 23rd percentile on extroversion “very low,” especially when it came to being friendly or cheerful. meanwhile, i scored “very high” on conscientiousness and openness and “average” on agreeableness, my high level of sympathy for other people making up for my low level of trust in them. finally, i came to the source of half my breakups, 90 percent of my therapy appointments, and most of my problems in general: neuroticism. i’m in the 94th percentile “extremely high.” i prescribed myself the same challenges that hudson had given his students. to become more extroverted, i would meet new people. to decrease neuroticism, i would meditate often and make gratitude lists. to increase agreeableness, the challenges included sending supportive texts and cards, thinking more positively about people who frustrate me, and, regrettably, hugging. in addition to completing hudson’s challenges, i decided to sign up for improv in hopes of increasing my extroversion and reducing my social anxiety. to cut down on how pissed off i am in general, and because i’m an overachiever, i also signed up for an anger management class. read: can personality be changed? hudson’s findings on the mutability of personality seem to endorse the ancient buddhist idea of “no self” no core “you.” to believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering. similarly, brian little writes that people can have “multiple authenticities” that you can sincerely be a different person in different situations. he proposes that people have the ability to temporarily act out of character by adopting “free traits,” often in the service of an important personal or professional project. if a shy introvert longs to schmooze the bosses at the office holiday party, they can grab a canapé and make the rounds. the more you do this, little says, the easier it gets. staring at my test results, i told myself, this will be fun! after all, i had changed my personality before. in high school, i was shy, studious, and, for a while, deeply religious. in college, i was fun loving and boy crazy. now i’m a basically hermetic “pressure addict,” as one former editor put it. it was time for yet another me to make her debut. ideally, in the end i would be happy, relaxed, personable. the screams of angry sources, the failure of my boyfriend to do the tiniest fucking thing they would be nothing to me. i would finally understand what my therapist means when she says i should “just observe my thoughts and let them pass without judgment.” i made a list of the challenges and attached them to my nightstand, because i’m very conscientious. immediately i encountered a problem: i don’t like improv. it’s basically a quaker meeting in which a bunch of office workers sit quietly in a circle until someone jumps up, points toward a corner of the room, and says, “i think i found my kangaroo!” my vibe is less “yes, and” and more “well, actually.” when i told my boyfriend what i was up to, he said, “you doing improv is like larry david doing ice hockey.” i was also scared out of my mind. i hate looking silly, and that’s all improv is. the first night, we met in someone’s townhouse in washington, d.c., in a room that was, for no discernible reason, decorated with dozens of elephant sculptures. right after the instructor said, “let’s get started,” i began hoping that someone would grab one and knock me unconscious. that didn’t happen, so instead i played a game called zip zap zop, which involved making lots of eye contact while tossing around an imaginary ball of energy, with a software engineer, two lawyers, and a guy who works on capitol hill. then we pretended to be traveling salespeople peddling sulfuric acid. if someone had walked in on us, they would have thought we were insane. and yet i didn’t hate it. i decided i could think of being funny and spontaneous as a kind of intellectual challenge. still, when i got home, i unwound by drinking one of those single serving wines meant for petite female alcoholics. a few days later, i logged in to my first zoom anger management class. christian jarrett, a neuroscientist and the author of be who you want, writes that spending quality time with people who are dissimilar to you increases agreeableness. and the people in my anger management class did seem pretty different from me. among other things, i was the only person who wasn’t court ordered to be there. we took turns sharing how anger has affected our lives. i said it makes my relationship worse less like a romantic partnership and more like a toxic workplace. other people worried that their anger was hurting their family. one guy shared that he didn’t understand why we were talking about our feelings when kids in china and russia were learning to make weapons, which i deemed an interesting point, because you’re not allowed to criticize others in anger management. the sessions i went to six mostly involved reading worksheets together, which was tedious, but i did learn a few things. anger is driven by expectations. if you think you’re going to be in an anger inducing situation, one instructor said, try drinking a cold can of coke, which may stimulate your vagus nerve and calm you down. a few weeks in, i had a rough day, my boyfriend gave me some stupid suggestions, and i yelled at him. then he said i’m just like my dad, which made me yell more. when i shared this in anger management, the instructors said i should be clearer about what i need from him when i’m in a bad mood which is listening, not advice. all the while, i had been working on my neuroticism, which involved making a lot of gratitude lists. sometimes it came naturally. as i drove around my little town one morning, i thought about how grateful i was for my boyfriend, and how lonely i had been before i met him, even in other relationships. is this gratitude? i wondered. am i doing it? what is personality, anyway, and where does it come from? contrary to conventional wisdom about bossy firstborns and peacemaking middles, birth order doesn’t influence personality. nor do our parents shape us like lumps of clay. if they did, siblings would have similar dispositions, when they often have no more in common than strangers chosen off the street. our friends do influence us, though, so one way to become more extroverted is to befriend some extroverts. your life circumstances also have an effect: getting rich can make you less agreeable, but so can growing up poor with high levels of lead exposure. a common estimate is that about 30 to 50 percent of the differences between two people’s personalities are attributable to their genes. but just because something is genetic doesn’t mean it’s permanent. those genes interact with one another in ways that can change how they behave, says kathryn paige harden, a behavioral geneticist at the university of texas. they also interact with your environment in ways that can change how you behave. for example: happy people smile more, so people react more positively to them, which makes them even more agreeable. open minded adventure seekers are more likely to go to college, where they grow even more open minded. harden told me about an experiment in which mice that were genetically similar and reared in the same conditions were moved into a big cage where they could play with one another. over time, these very similar mice developed dramatically different personalities. some became fearful, others sociable and dominant. living in mouseville, the mice carved out their own ways of being, and people do that too. “we can think of personality as a learning process,” harden said. “we learn to be people who interact with our social environments in a certain way.” this more fluid understanding of personality is a departure from earlier theories. a 1914 best seller called the eugenic marriage (which is exactly as offensive as it sounds) argued that it is not possible to change a child’s personality “one particle after conception takes place.” in the 1920s, the psychoanalyst carl jung posited that the world consists of different “types” of people thinkers and feelers, introverts and extroverts. (even jung cautioned, though, that “there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.”) jung’s rubric captured the attention of a mother daughter duo, katharine briggs and isabel briggs myers, neither of whom had any formal scientific training. as merve emre describes in the personality brokers, the pair seized on jung’s ideas to develop that staple of career day, the myers briggs type indicator. but the test is virtually meaningless. most people aren’t entjs or isfps; they fall between categories. over the years, poor parenting has been a popular scapegoat for bad personalities. alfred adler, a prominent turn of the 20th century psychologist, blamed mothers, writing that “wherever the mother child relationship is unsatisfactory, we usually find certain social defects in the children.” a few scholars attributed the rise of nazism to strict german parenting that produced hateful people who worshipped power and authority. but maybe any nation could have embraced a hitler: it turns out that the average personalities of different countries are fairly similar. still, the belief that parents are to blame persists, so much so that roberts closes the course he teaches at the university of illinois by asking students to forgive their moms and dads for whatever personality traits they believe were instilled or inherited. not until the 1950s did researchers acknowledge people’s versatility that we can reveal new faces and bury others. “everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role,” the sociologist robert ezra park wrote in 1950. “it is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.” around this time, a psychologist named george kelly began prescribing specific “roles” for his patients to play. awkward wallflowers might go socialize in nightclubs, for example. kelly’s was a rhapsodic view of change; at one point he wrote that “all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are.” judging by the reams of self help literature published each year, this is one of the few philosophies all americans can get behind. about six weeks in, my adventures in extroversion were going better than i’d anticipated. intent on talking to strangers at my friend’s wedding, i approached a group of women and told them the story of how my boyfriend and i had met i moved into his former room in a group house which they deemed the “story of the night.” on the winds of that success, i tried to talk to more strangers, but soon encountered the common wedding problem of too drunk to talk to people who don’t know me. for more advice on becoming an extrovert, i reached out to jessica pan, a writer in london and the author of the book sorry i’m late, i didn’t want to come. pan was an extreme introvert, someone who would walk into parties and immediately walk out again. at the start of the book, she resolved to become an extrovert. she ran up to strangers and asked them embarrassing questions. she did improv and stand up comedy. she went to budapest and made a friend. folks, she networked. in the process, pan “flung open the doors” to her life, she writes. “having the ability to morph, to change, to try on free traits, to expand or contract at will, offers me an incredible feeling of freedom and a source of hope.” pan told me that she didn’t quite become a hard core extrovert, but that she would now describe herself as a “gregarious introvert.” she still craves alone time, but she’s more willing to talk to strangers and give speeches. “i will be anxious, but i can do it,” she said. i asked her for advice on making new friends, and she told me something a “friendship mentor” once told her: “make the first move, and make the second move, too.” that means you sometimes have to ask a friend target out twice in a row a strategy i had thought was gauche. i practiced by trying to befriend some female journalists i admired but had been too intimidated to get to know. i messaged someone who seemed cool based on her writing, and we arranged a casual beers thing. but on the night we were supposed to get together, her power went out, trapping her car in her garage. instead, i caught up with an old friend by phone, and we had one of those conversations you can have only with someone you’ve known for years, about how the people who are the worst remain the worst, and how all of your issues remain intractable, but good on you for sticking with it. by the end of our talk, i was high on agreeable feelings. “love you, bye!” i said as i hung up. “lol,” she texted. “did you mean to say ‘i love you’?” who was this new olga? for my gratitude journaling, i purchased a notebook whose cover said, “gimme those bright sunshiney vibes.” i soon noticed, though, that my gratitude lists were repetitive odes to creature comforts and entertainment: netflix, yoga, tiktok, leggings, wine. after i cut my finger cooking, i expressed gratitude for the dictation software that let me write without using my hands, but then my finger healed. “very hard to come up with new things to say,” i wrote one day. i find expressing gratitude unnatural, because russians believe doing so will provoke the evil eye; our god doesn’t like too much bragging. the writer gretchen rubin hit a similar wall when keeping a gratitude journal for her book the happiness project. “it had started to feel forced and affected,” she wrote, making her annoyed rather than grateful. i was also supposed to be meditating, but i couldn’t. on almost every page, my journal reads, “meditating sucks!” i tried a guided meditation that involved breathing with a heavy book on my stomach i chose nabokov’s letters to véra only to find that it’s really hard to breathe with a heavy book on your stomach. i tweeted about my meditation failures, and dan harris, a former good morning america weekend anchor, replied: “the fact that you’re noticing the thoughts/obsessions is proof that you are doing it correctly!” i picked up harris’s book 10% happier, which chronicles his journey from a high strung reporter who had a panic attack on air to a high strung reporter who meditates a lot. at one point, he was meditating for two hours a day. when i called harris, he said that it’s normal for meditation to feel like “training your mind to not be a pack of wild squirrels all the time.” very few people actually clear their minds when they’re meditating. the point is to focus on your breath for however long you can even if it’s just a second before you get distracted. then do it over and over again. occasionally, when harris meditates, he still “rehearses some grand, expletive filled speech i’m gonna deliver to someone who’s wronged me.” but now he can return to his breath more quickly, or just laugh off the obsessing. harris suggested that i try loving kindness meditation, in which you beam affectionate thoughts toward yourself and others. this, he said, “sets off what i call a gooey upward spiral where, as your inner weather gets balmier, your relationships get better.” in his book, harris describes meditating on his 2 year old niece. as he thought about her “little feet” and “sweet face with her mischievous eyes,” he started crying uncontrollably. what a pussy, i thought. i downloaded harris’s meditation app and pulled up a loving kindness session by the meditation teacher sharon salzberg. she had me repeat calming phrases like “may you be safe” and “may you live with ease.” then she asked me to envision myself surrounded by a circle of people who love me, radiating kindness toward me. i pictured my family, my boyfriend, my friends, my former professors, emitting beneficence from their bellies like care bears. “you’re good; you’re okay,” i imagined them saying. before i knew what was happening, i had broken into sobs. after two brutal years, people may be wondering if surviving a pandemic has at least improved their personality, making them kinder and less likely to sweat the small stuff. “post traumatic growth,” or the idea that stressful events can make us better people, is the subject of one particularly cheery branch of psychology. some big events do seem to transform personality: people grow more conscientious when they start a job they like, and they become less neurotic when they enter a romantic relationship. but in general, it’s not the event that changes your personality; it’s the way you experience it. and the evidence that people grow as a result of difficulty is mixed. studies of post traumatic growth are tainted by the fact that people like to say they got something out of their trauma. it’s a nice thing to believe about yourself that, pummeled by misfortune, you’ve emerged stronger than ever. but these studies are mostly finding that people prefer to look on the bright side. read: the opposite of toxic positivity in more rigorous studies, evidence of a transformative effect fades. damian, the university of houston psychologist, gave hundreds of students at the university a personality test a few months after hurricane harvey hit, in november 2017, and repeated the test a year later. the hurricane was devastating: many students had to leave their homes; others lacked food, water, or medical care for weeks. damian found that her participants hadn’t grown, and they hadn’t shriveled. overall they stayed the same. other research shows that difficult times prompt us to fall back on tried and true behaviors and traits, not experiment with new ones. growth is also a strange thing to ask of the traumatized. it’s like turning to a wounded person and demanding, “well, why didn’t you grow, you lazy son of a bitch?” roberts said. just surviving should be enough. it may be impossible to know how the pandemic will change us on average, because there is no “average.” some people have struggled to keep their jobs while caring for children; some have lost their jobs; some have lost loved ones. others have sat at home and ordered takeout. the pandemic probably hasn’t changed you if the pandemic itself hasn’t felt like that much of a change. i blew off anger management one week to go see kesha in concert. i justified it because the concert was a group activity, plus she makes me happy. the next time the class gathered, we talked about forgiveness, which child weapons guy was not big on. he said that rather than forgive his enemies, he wanted to invite them onto a bridge and light the bridge on fire. i thought he should get credit for being honest who hasn’t wanted to light all their enemies on fire? but the anger management instructors started to look a little angry themselves. in the next session, child weapons guy seemed contrite, saying he realized that he uses his anger to deal with life, which was a bigger breakthrough than anyone expected. i was also praised, for an unusually tranquil trip home to see my parents, which my instructors said was an example of good “expectation management.” meanwhile, my social life was slowly blooming. a twitter acquaintance invited me and a few other strangers to a whiskey tasting, and i said yes even though i don’t like whiskey or strangers. at the bar, i made some normal person small talk before having two sips of alcohol and wheeling the conversation around to my personal topic of interest: whether i should have a baby. the woman who organized the tasting, a self proclaimed extrovert, said people are always grateful to her for getting everyone to socialize. at first, no one wants to come, but people are always happy they did. i thought perhaps whiskey could be my “thing,” and, to tick off another challenge from hudson’s list, decided to go to a whiskey bar on my own one night and talk to strangers. i bravely steered my toyota to a sad little mixed use development and pulled up a stool at the bar. i asked the bartender how long it had taken him to memorize all the whiskeys on the menu. “two months,” he said, and turned back to peeling oranges. i asked the woman sitting next to me how she liked her appetizer. “it’s good!” she said. this is awful! i thought. i texted my boyfriend to come meet me. the larger threat on my horizon was the improv showcase a free performance for friends and family and whoever happened to jog past picnic grove no. 1 in rock creek park. the night before, i kept jolting awake from intense, improv themed nightmares. i spent the day grimly watching old upright citizens brigade shows on youtube. “i’m nervous on your behalf,” my boyfriend said when he saw me clutching a throw pillow like a life preserver. from the january/february 2014 issue: surviving anxiety to describe an improv show is to unnecessarily punish the reader, but it went fairly well. along with crushing anxiety, my brain courses with an immigrant kid’s overwhelming desire to do whatever people want in exchange for their approval. i improvised like they were giving out good sat scores at the end. on the drive home, my boyfriend said, “now that i’ve seen you do it, i don’t really know why i thought it’s something you wouldn’t do.” i didn’t know either. i vaguely remembered past boyfriends telling me that i’m insecure, that i’m not funny. but why had i been trying to prove them right? surviving improv made me feel like i could survive anything, as bratty as that must sound to all my ancestors who survived the siege of leningrad. finally, the day came to retest my personality and see how much i’d changed. i thought i felt hints of a mild metamorphosis. i was meditating regularly, and had had several enjoyable get togethers with people i wanted to befriend. and because i was writing them down, i had to admit that positive things did, in fact, happen to me. but i wanted hard data. this time, the test told me that my extroversion had increased, going from the 23rd percentile to the 33rd. my neuroticism decreased from “extremely high” to merely “very high,” dropping to the 77th percentile. and my agreeableness score … well, it dropped, from “about average” to “low.” i told brian little how i’d done. he said i likely did experience a “modest shift” in extroversion and neuroticism, but also that i might have simply triggered positive feedback loops. i got out more, so i enjoyed more things, so i went to more things, and so forth. why didn’t i become more agreeable, though? i had spent months dwelling on the goodness of people, devoted hours to anger management, and even sent an e card to my mom. little speculated that maybe by behaving so differently, i had heightened my internal sense that people aren’t to be trusted. or i might have subconsciously bucked against all the syrupy gratitude time. that i had tried so hard and made negative progress “i think it’s a bit of a hoot,” he said. perhaps it’s a relief that i’m not a completely new person. little says that engaging in “free trait” behavior acting outside your nature for too long can be harmful, because you can start to feel like you are suppressing your true self. you end up feeling burned out or cynical. the key may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale, but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality depending on the situation. “the thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something; it’s more like rigidity across situations,” harden, the behavioral geneticist, told me. “so it’s okay to be a little bitchy in your heart, as long as you can turn it off?” i asked her. “people who say they’re never bitchy in their heart are lying,” she said. susan cain, the author of quiet and the world’s most famous introvert, seems reluctant to endorse the idea that introverts should try to be more outgoing. over the phone, she wondered why i wanted to be more extroverted in the first place. society often urges people to conform to the qualities extolled in performance reviews punctual, chipper, gregarious. but there are upsides to being introspective, skeptical, and even a little neurotic. she said it’s possible that i didn’t change my underlying introversion, that i just acquired new skills. she thought i could probably maintain this new personality, so long as i kept doing the tasks that got me here. hudson cautioned that personality scores can bounce around a bit from moment to moment; to be certain of my results, i ideally would have taken the test a number of times. still, i felt sure that some change had taken place. a few weeks later, i wrote an article that made people on twitter really mad. this happens to me once or twice a year, and i usually suffer a minor internal apocalypse. i fight the people on twitter while crying, call my editor while crying, and google how to become an actuary while crying. this time, i was stressed and angry, but i just waited it out. this kind of modest improvement, i realized, is the goal of so much self help material. hours a day of meditation made harris only 10 percent happier. my therapist is always suggesting ways for me to “go from a 10 to a nine on anxiety.” some antidepressants make people feel only slightly less depressed, yet they take the drugs for years. perhaps the real weakness of the “change your personality” proposition is that it implies incremental change isn’t real change. but being slightly different is still being different the same you but with better armor. the late psychologist carl rogers once wrote, “when i accept myself just as i am, then i can change,” and this is roughly where i’ve landed. maybe i’m just an anxious little introvert who makes an effort to be less so. i can learn to meditate; i can talk to strangers; i can be the mouse who frolics through mouseville, even if i never become the alpha. i learned to play the role of a calm, extroverted softy, and in doing so i got to know myself. this article appears in the march 2022 print edition with the headline “my personality transplant.” when you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. thank you for supporting the atlantic. more stories should you be prepping for trump? doomed to be a tradwife

stratechery plus learn moremember forum stratechery plus learn moremember forum latest podcast listen to podcast listen to this post: good morning, this week’s stratechery interview is with servicenow chairman and ceo bill mcdermott. mcdermott has had a long and storied career, including climbing to an executive position at xerox, becoming president of gartner and executive vice president at siebel systems, before taking over and transforming sap america. mcdermott’s success resulted in him becoming the first american co ceo (and later ceo) of sap in 2010. after leading a successful transition to the cloud, mcdermott left sap in 2019 to become the ceo of servicenow. i have only covered servicenow in passing in this update, but it is a company that i have been following for a while, thanks in part to its origin story: servicenow was founded in 2003 by fred luddy, who built a generalizable workforce automation platform in the cloud. what luddy soon found out, however, is that no one knew what that meant, so he built an it service desk application on top of his platform: that was the product that put servicenow on the map and led to their 2012 ipo. the underlying platform, however, was still generalizable, which meant that servicenow could easily expand to different job functions and specialize in different verticals. what is notable about this architecture is that an enterprise could, at least in theory, implement servicenow across all of their functions and geographies, and have everything running on the same data store and code base; this, by extension, makes servicenow very compelling first as a sort of universal interface for all company functions, and, more pertinently to today, the natural layer to implement ai and agentic workflows. we get into all of this in this interview, starting with mcdermott’s background and path to the top, why he took the servicenow job, the ai agent opportunity, the challenges in implementing them, and what the ai business model is going to be. we also touch on the nature of work, questions about ai driven job loss, and what it means to lead a big company. mcdermott tells an inspiring story, both about himself and servicenow, that i think you will enjoy. as a reminder, all stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add stratechery to your podcast player. on to the interview: this interview is lightly edited for clarity and length. topics: bill mcdermott, welcome to stratechery. bill mcdermott: thank you for having me, ben. so you obviously have an interesting and storied background in business and enterprise software in particular, and i do have some questions for you about that. but particularly in these conversations, the first time i talk to someone, i love to hear the background story, you have a very interesting one. take me back to the beginning. where’d you grow up? how’d you get started in technology? i think the path is quite compelling. bm: oh, thank you very much, ben. i was born in flushing, new york and my dad was a troubleshooter for con edison. he and my mom were the salt of the earth, they had me when they were very young. in fact, my mom had me when she was 18 years old. so we kind of grew up together, and i was in long island from flushing, and we lived in several different locations, but the one i’m most remembered for is amityville, long island. i guess my claim to that experience is i was a hardworking young person, like many of your listeners, i’m sure i had three or four jobs at a time before i was even in my mid teens, paper routes, pumping gas, waiting tables, stocking shelves and supermarkets, and ultimately i had a great job at the top italian restaurant. it was called amato’s in amityville, and i was working at the supermarket in some other odd jobs like pumping gas on the midnight shift at merrit gas station, and i walked across the street one day in my tuxedo pants and my tuxedo shirt and tie and the owner of a delicatessen had a “help wanted” sign. i said, i need all the hours i can get, and my dream is to consolidate all these hours into one thing and he said, “love to have you, man, you’re hired”. so i started working there, and ultimately bought that delicatessen as a teenage entrepreneur. and ben, i had no money. i bought it for $5,500 in notes, $7,000 with interest. i pay it off, it’s mine   i miss a payment, it all gets taken back. the secret sauce back then to this business was really getting in touch with customer service, because i had to charge more, i didn’t have economies of scale. i had to hire really great people, because you don’t want silent partners to take your money. i had to attract senior citizens that were within a couple of blocks of the store, blue collar workers that were flush rich on friday night and broke by sunday morning, so i gave them credit. and then i had to get the kids to walk a block and a half past 7 eleven from the amityville high school to come to my store, and that was big traffic. so i think one thing you might be interested in, i started delivering when doordash wasn’t even a thing. (laughing) not quite. a few more years to go for that. bm: exactly. i gave people credit in a notebook on trust, and they never ever let me down, and i built a video game room to attract the high school kids to walk past 7 eleven. i went down there one day and i saw 40 kids in line waiting to get in, and only four kids in the store. and i would ask them, “why are you all in line out here when there’s a big store in there?”, and they said, “well bill, they think we’re going to take things”. i said, “don’t worry about all that, just follow me down in my store”, so i took the whole line down. at that time, ben, i had put together a video game room thanks to the skills of my brother who built it. i cut a deal with the guy who was moving video games back then, asteroids and pac man. i mean look it up in wiki, most people today don’t really know it would existed, but it did and you had to put quarters  i’m old, don’t worry. i can remember that. bm: you can remember, right? so the guy wanted to sell them to me for $5,500. i told him, i don’t have the money, he said, “okay, $4,500”, i still don’t have the money. so i said, “but i have an idea. why don’t you just put your machines here? they’re always going to be yours and we split the quarters. so it’s always your asset, we split the quarters because it’s my store.” he said, “it’s not a bad idea, let’s do it”. so we put a dinosaur game in there, pac man and asteroids, and the kids were lined up kind of around the block to come into my store and play video games, and at the end of a very long day, one of the young people said to me, “bill, when we want to be treated with respect, have good food and play video games, we come to your store, and when we want to steal stuff, we head right to 7 eleven”. so that was kind of my first real experience, understanding that it’s all about the customer, that is the essence of business, and if you can get that right on the service side, you could sell for a premium, because they love the experience, but you also have to appeal to the market segments where you can reach them. in my case, it was senior citizens, blue collar workers, it’s a blue collar town, and then the young people coming from school, and thank goodness it all worked out. i sold the store, family got a nice beach house out of it, and i went on to knock on cold doors at the xerox corporation. and if you want me to tell you a little bit about that story, i’d be happy to tell you. well you’re obviously a great storyteller, i was going to ask you about the delicatessen. now i feel i have to come up with some high finagle link to what’s the connection between pac man and ai, but i’m worried you’re going to have an answer for that already ready to go. bm: it really is, because essentially pac man or asteroids was the control tower for how humans behaved. they got a thrill out of the game, and the unpredictability of the game is what kind of put them into the game. but if they had ai, it would’ve told them exactly how to navigate   so it wasn’t quite ai, but it did show you that people are locked and loaded on a screen that really adds value to their experience, and how they like to do things and how they like to have fun. so it was a great experience, but i always wanted to really lead and do something very substantial, and i was always enamored with the customers that would come in, this is what i went to school for, i put myself through school. where’d you go to undergrad again? i just ask because i know you went to kellogg for graduate school, so that was why when this interview was coming up i’m like, “oh, i get to talk to bill mcdermott”, i was trying to remember, i’ve talked to lots of ceos, why was this one stuck in my mind as a big deal? and it’s because going back to business school, it was, “oh yeah, bill mcdermott went here”, it was deep in my memory. bm: that’s really sweet, and i had a great experience there. i had a dean there named dean jacobs who was really a rock star, great leader. but i went to dowling college in oakdale, long island, because literally i had to do all my schoolwork in two days. i did tuesdays and thursdays and every other hour that i wasn’t in school i was in the deli, and i had a little bit of a process where when there weren’t customers in the store i had my books on the left side of the slicer. so if the customer came in, they wouldn’t feel guilty that they’re pulling me away from my homework, i would just simply welcome them quickly and get right back into the delicatessen and, “great to see you” and, “how can i help you?” and, “let’s rock and roll”, so that’s kind of how it worked. is this the attraction of software? instead of having to slice the salami every single time someone comes in, let’s try to write once and sell it to a bunch of people? bm: yeah, you know what it was, ben, at that time i came from a working class family and i wanted to be somebody, i think you really have to have a dream in your mind. and in my book winners dream, i said, “some men see things as they are and say why? i dream things that never were and say, why not?”   and that was the great robert kennedy quoting george bernard shaw at kansas university in 1968, so it was kind of foundational for me. so i wanted to get a job in new york city, and i went to the mall and i bought two $99 suits so i would look my best when i was interviewing, and a lot of these customers were coming into my store before they got to the long island rail road to take the journey into new york city, because that’s where a lot of people in line worked, and i would always talk with them. there was one guy in particular that worked at the xerox corporation, and xerox at that time, ibm, xerox, these were the two greatest companies for somebody to start out and get professionally trained in sales and really understand how business worked. so i really wanted this job [at xerox], and i got an interview, and on that day we lived in a house in long island that flooded, and so we had about four feet of water in the house. this was not an unusual thing, ben, this happened like two or three times a year. we were on a slab foundation, the canal goes up with northeast storms, the tide comes up and it came in the house. so it wasn’t like we hadn’t been there before, but i didn’t want to get the suit wet, so my brother carried me out to the street and kind of poured me into my dad’s car who took me to the long island rail road, and as i was getting out of the car, i loved my dad, i said, “dad, i just want to let you know i’m coming home with my employee badge in my pocket tonight”, and my dad said, “hey bill, you’re a good guy, man, don’t put all that pressure on yourself, just do your best”. and i said, “no, no, no. i’ll have the badge, take my word for it”. so i go up the escalator, i get on the train, it’s about an hour and a half door to door to top of the six is where i started my interview journey, that 666 5th avenue, and there was a ceo named david kearns, and i was reading the annual report on how he was reinventing the company with total quality management. total quality management really means, “we’re going to take care of customers around here, we’re going to build great products, we’re going to tell a great story and we’re going to provide a great service”. as i was seeing the reinvention of xerox, i got so excited and so into this guy’s mind, what he was trying to accomplish, that by the time i got to new york, i actually wanted to be the next david kearns. but i understood that i had to knock on doors, that’s how it works, you’ve got to work hard. but that day i go into the room, ben, and there’s all these brilliant young people with the best pedigrees you can imagine, princeton, dartmouth, notre dame, it goes on and on, and i looked around the room and there was a lot of people interviewing that day, and i was thinking to myself, “damn, i might’ve overshot it a little bit with my dad”. but i had a choice   are you going to panic or are you going to go back to what you do well? and what i did well is i talked to 500 people a day that came in and out of the deli, so i was comfortable talking to people, and i went around the room and i said, “hey, ben, what are you in here for? mike, what are you in here for? jane, what are you in here for?”, i would get answers like, “oh, i’m playing the field, i’m interviewing with this one, that one and the other one, this is one of the stops”. “oh, what are the other companies?”, “oh, maybe investment banking, maybe it’s morgan stanley”, and his stories went on. that’s when i knew i had my superpower, and my superpower was a very simple thing: i wanted it so much more than they did. so that day i went through interviews from top of the 6s all over midtown, and i finished at 9 west 57th street, and i met a guy named emerson fullwood. but what was interesting, i’m sitting in the lobby next to david andemicael, who’s still a great friend of mine to this day, by the way, and was sitting on the couch like two tin men waiting for the interview, and joanne siciliano was the receptionist at the time, and i walked over to her and i simply said, “joanne, i just wanted to register this with you, i’m not in a rush, i can wait all night, but i did want to kindly ask you if you could let mr. fullwood know that i’m in the building”. she went back, brought that note to emerson, and instantaneously within 30 seconds, he’s like, “i want to see him in my office”. he’s got this great suite in the corner office on the 38th floor, 9 west 57th looking out on central park, and i realized when i went through that doorstep, that hearth was a new venture for me. it was not an interview, i was in a fight for my life, because if i got that job i was in control of my own destiny and i was determined, because he was the big boss, to get that job. so we had a great conversation and at the end, your listeners may have heard this before, he said, “bill, it was really interesting getting to know you, you’re a passionate young guy. thank you so much, and the hr department is going to get in touch with you within the next couple of weeks”. and i said, “well, mr. fullwood…”. (laughing) i got a problem here. bm: yeah. “thank you for that, but i haven’t broken a promise to my father in 21 years, and i guaranteed him i’d have my employee badge in my pocket when i got back to amityville tonight”. i said nothing, he kind of tilts his head a couple of times like, “what’s up with this kid?”, and he goes, “bill mcdermott, as long as you haven’t committed any crimes, you’re hired”. and i said, “well, i certainly haven’t committed any crimes, do you mean it? is it for sure?”. so ben, i go around the table that was in between us, i pick him up in a beautiful bear hug, i thank him. i’m so emotional, so excited, it was unbelievable. i tear down the hall past joanne siciliano and david andemicael, i wish him good luck, i get in the elevator, i go down 38 floors and i go from 9 west 57th to bun and burger, which was on 57th and 6th, and i had to go to a pay phone and put quarters in, and i got my mom and dad kind of listening on the phone together and i said, “break out the korbel, i got the job”, and of course you might be familiar with korbel, that’s long island cristal, i think it costs about $2 a gallon. but it was where it all started, that was my break, and still to this day, i don’t do a ceo event without emerson fullwood at the event. him and his beautiful wife, vernita, come to every one of them. so the honor of a lifetime is to build a friendship with a great man like that and that subsequently built other great friendships with tom dolan, with anne mulcahy, with so many great people, norm ricard, that i love in that company. my great mentor, barry rand. just so many wonderful relationships and i still have them today. that is an amazing story. it’s like pure americana in many respects, which kind of makes it all the more jarring that you became the ceo of a german company. what was that like? how does that happen? i’m obviously referring to sap, but i’m curious about the path there, how you moved into the executive suite and also just the cultural angle of that entire experience. bm: it was a journey. i worked myself up at xerox to be the youngest corporate officer in xerox, and i was in my mid 30s at the time, and i took a job to be the president of gartner, which is the leading research and advisory firm in information technology, because i really wanted to go through the learning experience of learning from all the ceos and all their companies and be the voice of it at gartner, that was a wonderful experience. i then went on to siebel systems with tom siebel and ran sales and operations for tom, and then i was recruited by sap from siebel. it was amazing, really, because it was a beautiful thing in the sense that i love big, and sap was big and xerox was big and the other two were great, but they were a little smaller. i love the big stage, i love big, and some people do and some people don’t. so i was interviewed by everybody on the executive board of sap, including the founder of the company, and they had sap america, which was a wholly owned subsidiary and this was the ceo job of sap america, which was north america basically at the time. what was interesting about it, ben, is they had five ceos in six years, they all got bounced out of there like baseball managers. the last one was in a fit of a broken heart and tears just taking it on because they had missed every quarter, and when i got there, they told me the story, “yeah, bill, we missed 24 out of the last 25 quarters, this is really the fledgling operation in sap”, and i’m completely, completely excited when i have a high beta assignment. it’s like when i took xerox in puerto rico from 67th to 1st, i like high beta assignments, because when you turn something around, you make a mark, and i like making a mark and making a difference. i’ll never forget this one time i’m in new orleans, we’re having a kickoff meeting at sap, and i was a newly minted ceo of sap america, and you have these things called kickoff meetings, all the software companies do them. i’m in the new orleans convention center with thousands of people, and i look out there and i’ve got the executive board of sap in the first row, this is the top management, and they’re even on the board of directors when you’re an executive board member of sap, and i got up there and i laid out a vision. i told them that the company was founded in 1972, this was 2002, “and in the next two years, we’re going to do more than everybody that touched this place did in the previous 30”, and i laid out a number which was than double the revenues that they had achieved up to that point. i’ll never forget this, ben, the executive board is in the front row snickering back and forth to each other like, “this dude doesn’t understand what he’s getting himself into, this is a joke”, and all the people there were silent, you could hear the tumbleweed blowing through the aisles it was so quiet. and i said to the executive board who was snickering and smiling, “you could do anything you want in my meetings, but you cannot ever take away their dreams, they just got a new dream, and you’re a part of it too, so don’t get in the way and don’t tell me how things used to be, we’re going to create something that’s never been, that’s what we’re going to do”. i just got a letter from the cfo of that operation over the christmas holiday, it was literally a four page letter. he poured his heart out to me, which was so sweet and beautiful and i really appreciated it, and he basically said that not only did we achieve our goals, but we did it in a way that completely re established the brand, inspired the people, and created a dream that they did not even themselves believe that they could achieve. so the big lesson there to me is you have to have a dream to have a dream come true, and people underestimate the dream, the dream is the only limit. how tangible in your mind, as you tell me that story, and it’s a story i’m sure you’ve told a million times, do you see those executives in the front row as you’re giving this speech? bm: with entire clarity, i could tell you what ties they had on. i see them, i feel them, i understand them, and i also understand the thousands of people that were there, why they were quiet, because nobody ever showed them the top of the mountain, and how beautiful it is at the top of the mountain, and until you see the top of the mountain and you believe that you could be there, you really don’t understand what dreams and goals are all about. but that is really the essence of it all, you have to understand how big the dream needs to be. you have to goal orient around the dream, and then you have to build organizations beginning with the leadership team. the 11 direct reports i had, only 1 remained after about 90 days, and it doesn’t mean i go in and fire everybody, it just means i ask them sincerely, “do you have the temperament for the expectations that i just put out on the table? because they will not waver, this is completely on, and we are willing what we want and i need the leaders that want it as bad as i do, otherwise we’d be letting down a lot of people”. and so a lot of people just hit the eject button or they want a different type of assignment that’s more in tune with what they’re ready to give. so we cleaned that up, and once you clean that up, you clean up the management commitment all the way down the line. you get some layers out of the way, and you go directly to what that customer really wants, and what that customer really wants is not to buy software, they want to hire the software to do a job, and what job the software is doing is completely focused on their industry, what their goals and dreams are, and how we can help make that happen. i believe strongly in the power of design thinking, which basically means, “do we have the desirability? is the dream in place? do we have the feasibility? can we do it in a timeframe that makes sense for the customer?”, and ultimately viability. “does it really make business sense? do we help that customer win the championship?”, and all those things have to go into the critical thinking, the skill set, and the determination of an organization to win. and with me, they got to win big, if they don’t win big, it’s not good enough. how do you retain that? how do you still have the same drive to go to 7 eleven and take those kids down to your delicatessen and want to instill that in these american executives? and then how do you take that to germany? which is the next step up. bm: i’ve been really so blessed, because i never forgot where i came from, and i am hungrier now than i was then, because now every day i wake up, i think about the thousands of people that have their careers, their families, their dreams tied into the servicenow franchise. to me, that personal commitment and that love for people and that determination to give them a world, the kind of world that i want. the kind of world that i want for their families is the kind of world that i wanted for my family, and i wear them in their pictures and their emails, and when i shake their hand and when we groove together in big meetings and we make commitments to each other, i wear that in my heart every day, that’s my badge of passion. i think that’s really what it’s all about. you can get anything in this life you want if you help enough other people get what they want, and i think the true measurable leader is not what they take from this world, it’s what they give it. i think we all want to be remembered for giving it everything we’ve got. can you imagine being remembered as a leader that mailed it in? when you had a chance to impact thousands and thousands of people’s lives, how pathetic is that? i’m hungrier now than ever, and i insist that everyone around me has that level of commitment to excellence because that’s what it takes, and no one person can do it, everybody’s got to be all in. i’m blessed in that sense. i think that just growing up as a working class kid, watching my mom and dad, the two greatest role models i could ever imagine, scraping together quarters to put food on the table and things like that, seeing my dad scrape ice off of his windshield doing the midnight shift in sub zero temperatures to work the midnight shift because you got paid more for that shift, working a couple, three jobs sometimes, to make ends meet. what i think is most people in the corporate world are so privileged, and you can’t take anything for granted. i have enormous gratitude in my heart, and i’m so grateful to have the opportunity to do what i do and help other people do what they do, and i really want to be the company that does what we do, and we’re the only ones that can do it the way we do. because a lot of this, it’s emotion, it’s commitment, and it’s determination and speed and courage. it’s tremendously inspiring. i could take leadership lessons from you, but we’re already 25 minutes in. just to go back, you’re at sap america, how does this tie into the actual product development? sap needs to go from being an on prem software to being a cloud solution   and we’re going to segue to servicenow quickly, i want you to be able tell that story   but where do you develop and bring to bear understanding the technological landscape? what needs to happen? where we need to go, and along with this, getting people on board and getting there, where did that link develop from being a sales guy to being the whole enchilada? bm: well the first thing is performance is the price of freedom. when you’re a performer, you get a lot of attention and people want to follow you. i don’t do a lot of the corporate speak and the slideshows, we talk about the customer and what the customer needs to win the game, win the championship. everything was reverse engineered from what the customer really needs in the value chain of development of product management, product marketing, pre sales, sales, post sales, the ecosystem, the whole value chain by industry segmented to each of the personas in an enterprise. ultimately, you have to have the c suite relationships across the board, north and south and east and west, to reinvent companies, and so i got the memo on that quickly, and i made sure that development and the industry expertise and everything i just said in the value chain was connected to america, because what i learned is it wasn’t, and so i demanded that it was. by the way, i was brought in to make change. i did have a platform that was on fire because they were falling apart, and within a very short period of time, we were growing more than 50% year on year, and we were literally the darling of the company and really the darling of wall street. i grew that company up from 2010 with the help of a lot of great people   from 2002 to 2010 when i became the ceo of the whole company   and i remember when i became the ceo of the whole company, it was such a beautiful thing because i had a great partner and jim hagemann snabe, who was my co ceo from 2010 to 2014, and we made an agreement. basically, he was more mr. inside, i was more mr. outside, and how we’re going to take that development and put the pressure on that development to perform, and at the same time get that whole value chain i just talked about really build and performing in a global sense. you have to be a truly global software market leader to win this game. is that just the question of scale or is there network effects? why is that so important? bm: it’s both, it’s both. really getting to the essence of the customer, because you’ve got to realize that most of these companies are multinational or global companies themself, and so the way i do it is at the top of the house. and i get the top of the house aligned around what they’re really trying to achieve. what you find in most companies is they optimize by department. these systems, especially the ones that have been out there, believe it or not, ben, it’s wild man, they’ve been out there for more than a half a century. yeah, it’s amazing. bm: it’s wild, and they were designed to serve a specific function. it could be finance, it could be sales, it could be hr, it could be engineering, it could be supply chain and manufacturing, depending on the industry as an example. then there’s a whole ecosystem around that and how they do business, and knowing that is how you put it together. how do you put it together? you put it together at the top of an org chart at the top of an organization. you tap into this strategy, you really understand what they’re trying to achieve. i wasn’t the guy that wrote the code, but a lot of leaders don’t write the code. i was the guy that interpreted what had to be done with the code to meet the customer requirements and put those supplier specifications in place so that customer wins. and when that customer wins, they tell other customers they’re winning, and then they deploy it not just in new york, but they deploy it, in that case, it could have been shanghai, it could have been sydney, it could have been london, and it could have been the kingdom of saudi arabia. everything that i did, we did was all about global excellence and i believe that’s the way to scale and create great companies. the other thing is why would you walk away from global? because if you are good at what you do, you should localize what you do and make sure more and more people can take advantage of it. this is the scale effect, it’s what i mean by some people like the little pond, i don’t feel comfortable unless i’m in an ocean. was this the attraction of servicenow, where you’re taking sap, going back to the earlier days of software, trying to stitch it together to be a common platform that can scale? whereas you have this origin story for servicenow that i think is so telling: fred luddy builds this generalizable platform, no one understands it, so he has to build an it function specifically, but in the long run it turns out, “i have a generalizable platform that’s already built for everything you are trying to do”. bm: 100%. ben, one of the things i did at sap is i went on a shopping spree, because in 2010, the cloud was already there. we went to the internet, the world went to the cloud. in 2007, apple gave us the iphone moment, so mobile business was activated, and there was the culmination of these forces that were insurmountable and real. insurmountable in the sense that if you don’t do that, you lose the game. real in the sense that if you have enough capital and enough capability, you can get in the cloud quick with acquisitions. i needed to get the company in the cloud quick with acquisitions, and that’s what we did. but what you understand, as you build companies through m&a, you also take on different architectures, different cultures, and you don’t necessarily have visibility into, “hey, how’s my customer doing? are they happy? are they sad? are they in a position where they can be upgraded, cross sold, all these things?” then you have people. “how are they doing? do we know them? are we providing a great service to them so they stay loyal and they give us their absolute best effort?” these things were not visible to me. and so then you have the technical architectures. “how do we make sure all these companies that are now our company are on the same sheet of music, working on the same platform?” so what i learned is in asking my team, “can we do it?”, they said no, and i said, “why?”, and they said, “it’s an architectural issue”, and i said, “well, we got 20,000 engineers in germany, what are they doing all day?”, and they said, “no, no, it’s not that, they’d work hard, but it would take us a number of years and millions and millions and millions, and by then, servicenow would keep moving,” and so we implemented servicenow at sap, and that really satisfied all the issues that i just put on the table with you, and i thought to myself, “wow, we got one here”. what happened coincidentally is john donahoe, who was a great friend of mine, we were golfing at a morgan stanley conference, and we were with andre iguodala and a top guy at morgan stanley, he said, “bill, would you ever leave sap?”, and this is 2019, and i was giving a speech that night on my book, winners dream, and i’m like, “why are you asking me that?”, and he goes, “i just want to be your agent”, and i said, “well, okay, everyone needs a great agent, john”. so that night, i did the speech on winners dream, the book, still selling in hard copy, it’s pretty amazing a decade later. we’ll have a link. bm: yeah, it’s pretty cool, and really an honor that people find it helpful to their careers, i love that. so i did that and then i met the lead director, i met the head of the nom and gov [nomination & governance] committee, i met the compensation committee, one thing led to another, and i was asked to come to servicenow. i chose not to renew a five year agreement with sap, which i would have done if this opportunity did not present itself, and so why did i do it? why would you leave the biggest one to come to one that’s a little bit smaller, right? because it’s not the size of them, it’s the size that you can make them, and when i saw servicenow, i said, “i believe, with my experience and what i’ve seen, we can be the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century”, and that now has become branded inside the company and across the board of directors. i even had one that wanted to do a tattoo of desco21c. i said, “hey man, it’s good with me, if you want to do it, we’re going to be that”. so long story short, i came into the company with a passion that you just can’t even believe, it’s just a tornado of excitement. i traveled the world the first hundred days, i met every employee, i met every customer that was a big customer, i met a hundred of them in person, in the first hundred days, and then we got into the first quarter of 2020, and covid hit, and what was wild, ben, i’m in a conference room with the leadership team, we’re going to do blue sky thinking, we’re going to invent that desco21c, and i look around the table and people are like, “oh man, so down with the covid thing”, and i said, “look, we’ll never be a great company or a great brand if we don’t help the world solve for covid, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to put everything into being the company that enables customers to do business anywhere, including from home, so the continuity of their business does not change, whether they’re working in the public or the private sector, we’re taking this one on”. so in 24 hours, we had the commitment of the whole company. in seven days, with unbelievable engineering, we put out the first product to help people in this world where they had to go home and they had to continue their operations. the next thing was, “okay, now we’ve got covid, you’ve got vaccines that are being manufactured, you’ve got to distribute them, you’ve got to monitor all that, and ultimately, you’ve got to track the success factors and how it impacted the human beings that took it”, and we took whole countries. we had scotland in a week, we had them totally on servicenow, we did it in parts of germany, lots of parts of the united states, lots of parts of asia. then when we got everybody through that, we had unbelievable success stories. ben, one of my favorites, my great friend adam silver, the commissioner of the nba, he had to keep the whole league running in orlando. remember? the nba was in a bubble, that was all on servicenow. the whole thing was servicenow managing all the processes, all the documents, all the people, all the interactions on servicenow, and there’s many stories like that. so what’s the moral of the story? the moral of the story is that was the first flag on the ground, that we matter, that we are a great company, because we make great products, we care about customers and we give them a great service. these stories were rapidly fired around the world, and people really started to say, “i want to be part of servicenow’s team”, and so as you might’ve noticed, we’re receiving 1.6 million resumes now per year. it’s very hard to get in here, it’s harder than getting into stanford or harvard if you look at the success rate of being hired here, but we only hire 9.5s and 10s, and i think that’s what’s really building the future. we have great people, the products, especially ai, now growing 150% quarter over quarter, and ben, i just want to give you this vision. if you think about the great iphone moment with steve jobs, i think about the iphone, and i have two in my pocket, they’re my six shooters, i don’t go anywhere without them, but here’s the beauty of the iphone. it’s gorgeous, you look at that glass, and every day you wake up, you’re looking forward to getting into it. the complexity built into it is massive, the ecosystem around it is massive. we are that. we are the ai platform for business transformation in the world of business. whether it becomes a public sector or a private sector solution in all industries impacting all personas, everybody deserves to have an agentic ai improve their lives, and what i believe is that there is no artificial intelligence without human intelligence. so we put all our efforts into making sure that pane of glass is immaculate, the integrations into the legacy chaos is handled, and these agents are not only solving functional issues, but we are the controller of ai transformation, where we integrate and work with all the other agents. this is something, ben, that a lot of people don’t realize. if you start off with agents, let’s just say, in a sales function, because that’s getting a lot of interesting advertising, let’s just assume you have multiple instances, and you’re a big company and those instances aren’t even integrated, let’s talk about that global economy. so what you’re doing in london might be different than new york, or might be different than what you’re doing in sydney or mumbai, those aren’t integrated, so now i’m going to start with agents. by definition, i’m optimizing the agent for a specific function, a specific set of people in a specific location. that’s fine, do that, but what we do is we control the whole tower, where we’ll integrate into that and make that a lot better, because now it’s going to interface with finance, with legal, with hr, with engineering, because people work in teams across organizations to get stuff done. so if you’re a salesperson and you need legal involved because of the terms and conditions, or you need finance involved because of the pricing, and you need hr involved because we’re promising some intellectual property and smart people to make the customer successful, all of a sudden, it’s not such a, “let me sell you something” story anymore, and then you think about the engineers. one question on that, all those different functions. so you have this idealized view, where servicenow starts with the real product market fit in it, and then obviously the support tickets and all those sorts of things, suddenly other functions in the company want to start using it. you have a very clear land and expand model. you come in and say, “we can specialize this for specific industries”, and in this sort of story, this ai pitch is very compelling, because we’ve spread over the entire company, the different functions, we’re specialized already to the industry, and it’s the obvious layer to put ai on top. the question is, that’s the story   where are we in that overall sort of shift from being an it product to a little bit of finance or whatever, and is it we’re already there and now we’re layering on ai, or people are going to understand that to effectively leverage ai, they need this broad coverage, the operating system of the enterprise, and this is going to actually drive servicenow into all these other parts of the company so that they can get ai? is it sort of a two step process? bm: brilliant, ben. basically, if you think of it this way, we are the ai operating system for the enterprise. that’s jensen huang, the great jensen huang of nvidia, that’s how he sees servicenow. that’s his quote, not mine. i said we’re the ai platform for business transformation, either one of them, the clarity is this, we have built agentic ai with nvidia. when i first started with servicenow, i’m in year six now, it’s pretty hard to believe, and we were building a agentic ai then. we were taking the gpu stack from nvidia directly to the servicenow platform, and you’re right, it started in it. how you service the business manager, assets manager operations, secure the business   we have a strategic defense initiative to integrate all the security properties into one visual with servicenow, so you see and can react to everything. but then we realized, “hey, think about employees on the mobile, they want to get all the services from their original recruitment to hiring, to onboarding, to training, to managing their skill sets so they could be successful in an ai world”. they have comp questions, hr questions, healthcare questions. ultimately, if people leave, you’ve got to off board them properly, which is why i was so proud of winning the american opportunity index as the number 1 software company in that index out of 400 of the greatest companies the world. this is something that howard schultz put together in his amazing, amazing capacity and what he’s done to help the world. that was an honor. so people are huge, and then sales. i want to give you the sales thing, there once was an sfa story, and it was great, you need sfa. sales force automation, for the listeners. bm: you need that sfa, sales force automation, exactly, that game has been played. what’s happened now, when the world went digital in 2007, it got through the financial crisis, if you remember, it was a tough one in 2008, and the bounce back started slowly in 2009, people realized, “hey, i need the internet, i need the cloud, i need the mobile, but i also something else, i really need all the channels”, because at this time, the internet and cloud computing, and the big distribution channels of the hyperscalers and so on was taking form. so what they realized is, “i need to connect with my customer in every channel, i need to meet the customer where they are”. so direct to consumer, for example, or retail or wholesale, any channel that the customer’s in, i’ve got to be in that. okay, so that’s the sell side, but on the service side, you also have to know all the heuristics around their assets, their operations, what they’re trying to achieve, because it could be a service call. so what is unique? what is the difference between servicenow and the other market participants? we’re the only platform where you can sell, fulfill and service the customer in the complete end to end value chain on one platform, and even if you want the other platforms that are out there, because a lot of chaos exists, we integrate seamlessly into them, which i love this story. or on top of it, i think, is maybe a better way to think. bm: that’s true, that’s very true. so think about a clean pane of glass above chaos, because just like the iphone, you don’t want to know about the chaos that’s going on under that glass. you just want to press a button and get stuff done, and that’s what we have done for the enterprise, in all the functions. whether it be finance or hr or sales and engineering now, with natural language, you can literally text, build code, take out 60% of the setup work to build a great innovation, have a knowledge graph with how it impacts the entire company. and incidentally, ben, this is super cool. we actually invented the world’s best database with raptordb. so now all of the data in this customer database of servicenow is now managed by the best in memory database in the world, that also integrates with the great companies like snowflake and databricks and the great hyperscalers like google and amazon, of course, microsoft, and so those companies are building large language models too, and we seamlessly integrate our llms on our platform with the data structured and unstructured that exists in the enterprise, including oracle’s databases, by the way, and all the llms, because the llms will do important things. they will do great things, and the cost is dropping precipitously. so that’s highly commoditized now, and why wouldn’t we include those interactions with the servicenow platform? so the beauty of this, ben, and where i think the big idea is whatever you did in the past, don’t worry about it, because you’ll either turn the oxygen off because it’s not performing enough for you, but we can put it all into servicenow or leave it where it is. we can make a zero copy of it on the data side to perform a workflow and automate the way work is done, or you can put it all in servicenow and we’ll do it for you. so we give you choice, and you can run it in all the hyperscaler clouds too, we’ve integrated our platform with them. we give you a choice. of all the things i’ve learned about customer satisfaction and loyalty, customers don’t want to go on forced marches. they don’t want to be told, “this is what you have to do, or else”   they want choice, and they also want to protect the investments that they’ve made, and some of these companies are very good companies and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be highly cooperative with them, and that’s the model we have forged in the enterprise, and that’s why i think we’re growing faster than all the other ones. is there a trade off there? i mean, you come from the sap world and the historical two year integrations, and we might get there. if we get there, it’ll be great, if we don’t, well, we gave it a best shot, but at the end of the day, if you’re going to implement an erp system, it has to be top to bottom, it’s a heavy lift. when you jump forward to this ai bit, sure, you’re telling a great story, you can do it all with us or you can plug in your platform and we’ll make it work. is there a real trade off, though, where the companies that actually commit, that go all the way through so the data is in a common structure, it is deeply understandable by your agents and the platform you’re building, are going to have a better experience, and actually, we’re back in the world of big installations just because the payoff’s going to be better? bm: well, i think it’s ideal. there’s always the idealism that you can bring to everything, and of course, every company is going to tell you it’s ideal if you do it in their platform or their system, and we’re obviously happy to do that, but that’s not real. these environments are very heterogeneous environments. you have to deal with legacy that’s going back almost six decades now, it’s crazy. so the first thing that customers need to ask themselves, “do i really want to upgrade the old one in a function to get the new version of the old one? or do i want to rethink and transform my company and run it differently?”. so maybe the best idea is to use the old one as a database that feeds the automated workflow that’s agentic ai driven. right. you’ll take the user experience off the top of it even though it’s still there. bm: precisely. and ben, think of it this way, let’s just take the federal government in the united states, there’s a mandate now that everybody has to return to the office, they’re the biggest employer in the usa, so now they got to all come back into the office. let’s just deal with the human aspect of this. on average, this is worse in some companies, but on average, people are swivel chairing in and out of 17 different applications in their office a day that has been measured in a productivity sense by great consulting firms who have determined in work and productivity studies that is normally around one third of their productivity that gets crushed. but the big thing is they’re not happy, they don’t like going to the office. why don’t they like going to the office? because they want to look at that clean pane of glass and press buttons and they want agentic ai telling them, you’re in a complex situation, this is what you should do. we have the data sources that we scanned, we understand the heuristics of what you’re dealing with, we have literally hundreds if not millions in some cases, trillions of pieces of evidence in the workflows that we’ve done since the company started, and this is the decision, “press green, go”. and then in some cases, people say to me, “wow, bill, now i’ve got 85% with agentic ai”, in sales call center functions as an example, the cases are 85% deflected, so there’s only 15% of the cases left over. they say, “well what does that mean? does that mean i’m going to have less jobs?”   hey man, you’re turning over call center agents at 30% a year so maybe you won’t have to backfill them, and maybe the people that you have will stay because they actually enjoy their job again, the computers are doing the work that has been crushing their soul and their day to day activities. so i think we have to really emphasize the impact and the power of agentic ai on human productivity, but also human productivity and happiness, they’ll want to come into that office, they don’t like the one they have now, and we can solve that problem. but this is a tension that’s being raised. you said it earlier in this interview, there’s not any such thing as artificial intelligence without human intelligence, and yet you go back to those erp systems or you go back to those original accounting systems, and the reality is you can make the case that was the single greatest job displacement done by technology. you’re wiping out these entire back rooms of people doing this by hand when you’re talking about this idea of people don’t want to press buttons. well, or people do want to press buttons like ai can press buttons   this feels like marketing speak on what is actually is going to be job replacement. bm: i don’t believe that, and let me explain to you why. ben, you can go to any major market in the world today, and they have millions of job openings for tech talent, there is a deficit of tech talent in the global economy that is mind numbing, it’s in the millions and millions. so what i’m basically saying now is you have two choices. you either get on the bus of agentic ai and platforms that matter now, or you’re going to fall behind. and why do i think agentic ai is not going to take jobs away? that it’s actually going to be a job producer? because there’s such a tech deficit, and because that tech deficit is real, there’s many things around business model innovation that customers can’t do because they don’t have tech talent to do it. so what’s going to happen with agentic ai, you’re right, jobs will change, humans will do more interesting parts of work, and they’ll have to be trained and re skilled for that, but someone has to fill the tech deficit. so this is a complementary workforce, it’s called agentic agents. they work 24/7, 365 days a year, you don’t have to give them a healthcare plan and they don’t need lunch, so they’re in great shape to get stuff done. we are going to control the operating system for how that agentic ai is going to change the game in every enterprise in the world, and we will integrate with others if they choose to do or go that route. i can’t stop them from going the old way, there are habits that are built into these companies that are people in these companies that are well meaning and lovely, but if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got, and there’s a changing world now and they got to realize it’s happening so quick. so my advice is simply leverage what you did, get it into a modern automation platform like servicenow where you can go to every corner of the office and change people’s lives. at the same time, you’ll make the judgment call on what you need to do with those core systems, but i could tell you it’s not what you’ve always done, because you’ll get what you always got, and that will not be good enough in an agentic ai driven world. that’s where we’re at in this cycle right now. it’s not a hype cycle, this is a $20 trillion market bend by 2030 in terms of its impact on global gdp. for every $1 you put in to ai, you’re going to get a return of $5 when it’s well invested, instead of these pet projects that people are just like experimenting. we got to go from ai hallucination to ai driven business strategies, and that’s what we’re doing. so everywhere we go, if we’re at the c suite, they hear this story, we land it, and they just really see the world for what it is. got it. well, particularly at your level, the allure i think from the top is very compelling. to your point, the challenge is the rank and file, in that, are they going to adopt? is it demographic change, is it backfilling or whatever it might be? i mean, just to touch on the business model bit, does the tension that i’m pushing at of this balance between human intelligence and ai intelligence and job shifting, is that why you’re doing the, “well, we’re not giving up on this seat subscription business, but we’re layering on consumption on top of that”? that is sort of an admission that it’s not going to be really more of the same, we need a new way to think about monetizing that. is consumption pricing the future of all this sort of stuff? bm: it’s kind of a misnomer on this consumption, because we as a company have always had seat based pricing and consumption, where there were certain guardrails and certain usability requirements and amounts where people could pull and do things with the system to get their outcomes. so this isn’t new. what is new? and what we have done, which i think is a watershed event, we have basically said with our pro plus platform, we’re going to give you all the agentic ai innovation. so you’ll still have your per seat model, which customers like because they like predictability and how they budget, they bet on the platforms that matter, like servicenow, they want that. but at the same time, they don’t want to go on a forced march. i keep saying this, they want somebody that’s a real partner that really cares and wants to help them deploy the agentic ai so they get the business value from the agentic ai. so we are working around the clock to make sure they understand how to do it, how to get the value from it, and ultimately, we’re giving them thousands and thousands of use cases to take the soul crushing work away from the business, but it needs to get done. it’s going to be there, we need to move it to agentic ai. and then when they see that, they say to themselves, “my goodness, i can start thinking about a new business, i’m taking a lot of waste, i’m improving a lot of productivity, my people like it”. they see it because they like it because they can see themselves in the picture. people have a deep human need to see themselves in the picture. i look at this glass, i understand what they’re doing and i know that i could be a part of that, and they want that. so our gearing right now is to help them consume it as fast as they can and get as much value out of it as they possibly can. and yes, at some point they will consume more and more of it and yes, the consumption meter kicks in at some point, that’s extremely pleasing to both sides. that is a win win situation. because ben, my biggest worry, and i do worry about this, i really care about these customers. we have 27,000 people at servicenow that have a hungry and humble culture because of the great fred luddy that you mentioned earlier. our original founder is a beautiful man, love the guy, and so does all 27,000, we love the culture we have, that’s why it’s the best place to work, the most trusted place in business, the opportunity index winner, because we’re not only good to people when they work here, but if they do leave someday because they hit a point in their life where they want to do something different, they excel wherever they go, and that’s what howard schultz is managing with the american opportunity index. it’s totally driven by people and their votes, so it’s wildly exciting to me. what’s also wildly exciting to me is helping these customers win. when i show up, they know i want to do business. there’s not going to be a secret if i walk into the room, but they also know if i give them my word, i’ll get it done, and that is absolutely clear to everyone that works with us, whether it’s an employee, a partner or a customer, whatever it takes to keep the promise, we do it, and i think that’s what it’s kind of all about. that’s why i love the pricing model, i’m glad you brought it up because it’s so customer centric, it’s what they really want. right. they win, you win. one final question to tie your career path together and this ai moment. when you look back at your time at xerox or your time at sap and now servicenow, is there a bit where a company can maybe go through one transition past where they were, but then they’re going to hit a wall? like you think about servicenow vs. sap, sap was able to go from on prem to the cloud and it’s a marvelous transition, you deserve a lot of credit for it, the business grew spectacularly. but to your point, there’s still ultimately a vertical offering focused on a particular use case. you come to servicenow, it’s this plane across the business, thanks to the fact it was built the wrong way in many respects to start out, started out as an automation platform that was generalizable, and now it’s a transition to ai that they can take because it’s the next step. but maybe other companies that were further back or had to go through another transition and had all this morass that they had to tie together, maybe they realize they should just ask servicenow to come in and do it, they’re going to be stuck. bm: i think it’s really important in an agentic ai world that you choose platforms that matter and platforms for this generation, which is why when i came here, i said, we’ll be the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. most of the companies that you’re referring to that are excellent companies with well known brands, they’re 20th century companies, and most of them that you really know have been around a half century or more. and if you think about it, in technology, it changes so quickly. it’s very hard to have a company that’s around a half century or more stay the innovative market leader. so that’s a feat of leadership when that happens and yes, i appreciate what we did with my prior company and thank you very much for recognizing it. had we not gone to the cloud, where would it be? with servicenow, what’s magic is we’re deep, so we go deep in all the functions and all the business processes. but it’s one platform. bm: exactly, but we’re also wide because we go to all corners of the office. so if you look at the idris elba commercial, that idris elba commercial is not just our great brand ambassador idris elba that we love and he believes in servicenow and he wanted this, but we’re also going to take that to africa and we’re going to rethink how business can be done in sherbro island and other places and that had a real deep meaning to idris. so we’re doing the commercial based on what we’re actually doing, “what are we really doing?”, and so i think when i see a lot of advertisement, i think to myself, “is that what you’re really doing?”. we try to keep it extremely authentic and here’s the big picture, you have to take agentic ai, east and west horizontally, all functions across a company. today, ben, most of our business, even though you’re right, we are absolutely the market leader in all things technology   it, if you will   we have expanded into the employee, the customer, and of course, the creator experience and all the erp functions. so if you think about finance, if you think about supply chain, optimizing shop floors and manufacturing, reinventing the regulatory environment of financial services, you can’t come up with a business process today that we’re not involved in, and that is what i believe is the secret, it’s the gateway to fundamentally transform the way business has done. what’s so cool about it is we build at a rapid pace, we can prototype something and have it in the marketplace in a few days. we implement our software and these great projects in weeks and months, we don’t discuss years and years. by the time you implement something and you have to say years, the technology has already changed so much that by the time you implement it, you need to upgrade it. so that’s so cool about the cloud, we constantly pour the innovation on, the customer gets that continuous innovation and it doesn’t stop, and we’ve had some unbelievable agentic ai releases that have rocked the world and we’re only getting started. the servicenow strategy placement and this idea of being the pane of glass, i totally get it, it makes total sense, it’s very compelling. i’m inspired talking to you right now, it’s hard to bet against, so i appreciate you coming on. it’s great to talk and i’m looking forward to seeing what you accomplish. bm: hey ben, thank you so much. i heard a lot about you and it was all very, very positive and i really appreciate the questions and the fact that i think we got inside of some of the things that can really change people’s lives and really change the way companies run. so i feel very honored to have been a part of this exchange with you. thank you so much, ben. this daily update interview is also available as a podcast. to receive it in your podcast player, visit stratechery. the daily update is intended for a single recipient, but occasional forwarding is totally fine! if you would like to order multiple subscriptions for your team with a group discount (minimum 5), please contact me directly. thanks for being a supporter, and have a great day! get notified about new articles please verify your email address to proceed. stratechery plus updates stratechery plus podcasts stratechery plus interviews the most popular and most important posts on stratechery by year. explore all free articles on stratechery. explore all posts on stratechery. stratechery plus updates stratechery plus podcasts stratechery plus interviews © stratechery llc 2025 | terms of service | privacy policy proudly powered by wordpress. hosted by pressable.

the chrysler building is an art deco skyscraper on the east side of manhattan in new york city, at the intersection of 42nd street and lexington avenue in midtown manhattan. at 1,046 ft (319 m), it is the tallest brick building in the world with a steel framework. it was both the world's first supertall skyscraper and the world's tallest building for 11 months after its completion in 1930. as of 2019[update], the chrysler is the 12th tallest building in the city, tied with the new york times building.[12] originally a project of real estate developer and former new york state senator william h. reynolds, the building was commissioned by walter chrysler, the head of the chrysler corporation. the construction of the chrysler building, an early skyscraper, was characterized by a competition with 40 wall street and the empire state building to become the world's tallest building. the chrysler building was designed and funded by walter chrysler personally as a real estate investment for his children, but it was not intended as the chrysler corporation's headquarters. an annex was completed in 1952, and the building was sold by the chrysler family the next year, with numerous subsequent owners. when the chrysler building opened, there were mixed reviews of the building's design, some calling it inane and unoriginal, others hailing it as modernist and iconic. reviewers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries regarded the building as a paragon of the art deco architectural style. in 2007, it was ranked ninth on the american institute of architects' list of america's favorite architecture. the facade and interior became new york city designated landmarks in 1978, and the structure was added to the national register of historic places as a national historic landmark in 1976. the chrysler building is on the eastern side of lexington avenue between 42nd and 43rd streets in midtown manhattan in new york city.[13] the land was donated to the cooper union for the advancement of science and art in 1902.[14][15] the site is roughly a trapezoid with a 201 foot long (61 m) frontage on lexington avenue; a 167 foot long (51 m) frontage on 42nd street; and a 205 foot long (62 m) frontage on 43rd street.[16] the site bordered the old boston post road,[17][18] which predated, and ran aslant of, the manhattan street grid established by the commissioners' plan of 1811. as a result, the east side of the building's base is similarly aslant.[19] the building is assigned its own zip code, 10174. it is one of 41 buildings in manhattan that have their own zip codes, as of 2019[update].[20] the grand hyatt new york hotel and the graybar building are across lexington avenue, while the socony mobil building is across 42nd street. in addition, the chanin building is to the southwest, diagonally across lexington avenue and 42nd street.[13] the chrysler building was designed by william van alen in the art deco style and is named after one of its original tenants, automotive executive walter chrysler.[21][22] with a height of 1,046 feet (319 m), the chrysler is the 12th tallest building in the city as of 2019[update], tied with the new york times building.[23] the building is constructed of a steel frame infilled with masonry, with areas of decorative metal cladding. the structure contains 3,862 exterior windows.[6] approximately fifty metal ornaments protrude at the building's corners on five floors reminiscent of gargoyles on gothic cathedrals.[24] the 31st floor contains gargoyles[25] as well as replicas of the 1929 chrysler radiator caps,[26][27] and the 61st floor is adorned with eagles[25] as a nod to america's national bird.[28] the design of the chrysler building makes extensive use of bright "nirosta"[29][30] stainless steel, an austenitic alloy developed in germany by krupp.[31][32][33][34] it was the first use of this "18 8 stainless steel" in an american project,[35] composed of 18% chromium and 8% nickel.[34] nirosta was used in the exterior ornaments, the window frames, the crown, and the needle.[36] the steel was an integral part of van alen's design, as e.e. thum explains: "the use of permanently bright metal was of greatest aid in the carrying of rising lines and the diminishing circular forms in the roof treatment, so as to accentuate the gradual upward swing until it literally dissolves into the sky...."[24][37] stainless steel producers used the chrysler building to evaluate the durability of the product in architecture. in 1929, the american society for testing materials created an inspection committee to study its performance, which regarded the chrysler building as the best location to do so; a subcommittee examined the building's panels every five years until 1960, when the inspections were canceled because the panels had shown minimal deterioration.[28] the chrysler building's height and legally mandated setbacks influenced van alen in his design.[32] the walls of the lowermost sixteen floors rise directly from the sidewalk property lines, except for a recess on one side that gives the building a u shaped floor plan above the fourth floor.[38][39] there are setbacks on floors 16, 18, 23, 28, and 31, making the building compliant with the 1916 zoning resolution. this gives the building the appearance of a ziggurat on one side and a u shaped palazzo on the other.[39] above the 31st floor, there are no more setbacks until the 60th floor, above which the structure is funneled into a maltese cross shape[40] that "blends the square shaft to the finial", according to author and photographer cervin robinson.[39] the floor plans of the first sixteen floors were made as large as possible to optimize the amount of rental space nearest ground level, which was seen as most desirable. the u shaped cut above the fourth floor served as a shaft for air flow and illumination. the area between floors 28 and 31 added "visual interest to the middle of the building, preventing it from being dominated by the heavy detail of the lower floors and the eye catching design of the finial. they provide a base to the column of the tower, effecting a transition between the blocky lower stories and the lofty shaft."[39] the ground floor exterior is covered in polished black granite from shastone, while the three floors above it are clad in white marble from georgia. there are two main entrances, on lexington avenue and on 42nd street, each three floors high with shastone granite surrounding each proscenium shaped entryway. at some distance into each main entryway, there are revolving doors "beneath intricately patterned metal and glass screens", designed so as to embody the art deco tenet of amplifying the entrance's visual impact. a smaller side entrance on 43rd street is one story high.[41][32][42] there are storefronts consisting of large nirosta steel framed windows at ground level.[43][32] office windows penetrate the second through fourth floors.[32] the west and east elevations contain the air shafts above the fourth floor, while the north and south sides contain the receding setbacks.[32] below the 16th floor, the facade is clad with white brick, interrupted by white marble bands in a manner similar to basket weaving.[44][45] the inner faces of the brick walls are coated with a waterproof grout mixture measuring about .mw parser output .frac{white space:nowrap}.mw parser output .frac .num,.mw parser output .frac .den{font size:80%;line height:0;vertical align:super}.mw parser output .frac .den{vertical align:sub}.mw parser output .sr only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);clip path:polygon(0px 0px,0px 0px,0px 0px);height:1px;margin: 1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}1⁄16 inch (1.6 mm) thick.[46] the windows, arranged in grids, do not have window sills, the frames being flush with the facade.[32] between the 16th and 24th floors, the exterior exhibits vertical white brick columns that are separated by windows on each floor. this visual effect is made possible by the presence of aluminum spandrels between the columns of windows on each floor. there are abstract reliefs on the 20th through 22nd floor spandrels, while the 24th floor contains 9 foot (2.7 m) decorative pineapples.[32] above the third setback, consisting of the 24th through 27th floors, the facade contains horizontal bands and zigzagged gray and black brick motifs. the section above the fourth setback, between the 27th and 31st floors, serves as a podium for the main shaft of the building.[38][32] there are nirosta steel decorations above the setbacks.[44][39] at each corner of the 31st floor, large car hood ornaments were installed to make the base look larger. these corner extensions help counter a common optical illusion seen in tall buildings with horizontal bands, whose taller floors would normally look larger.[39][40] the 31st floor also contains a gray and white frieze of hubcaps and fenders,[41][5] which both symbolize the chrysler corporation and serves as a visual signature of the building's art deco design.[6][33][41] the bonnet embellishments take the shape of mercury's winged helmet and resemble hood ornaments installed on chrysler vehicles at the time.[40] the shaft of the tower was designed to emphasize both the horizontal and vertical: each of the tower's four sides contains three columns of windows, each framed by bricks and an unbroken marble pillar that rises along the entirety of each side. the spandrels separating the windows contain "alternating vertical stripes in gray and white brick", while each corner contains horizontal rows of black brick.[47] the chrysler building is renowned for, and recognized by its terraced crown, which is an extension of the main tower.[39] composed of seven radiating terraced arches, van alen's design of the crown is a cruciform groin vault of seven concentric members with transitioning setbacks.[41][48] the entire crown is clad with nirosta steel, ribbed and riveted in a radiating sunburst pattern with many triangular vaulted windows, reminiscent of the spokes of a wheel.[41][33][49] the windows are repeated, in smaller form, on the terraced crown's seven narrow setbacks.[33][49] due to the curved shape of the dome, the nirosta sheets had to be measured on site, so most of the work was carried out in workshops on the building's 67th and 75th floors.[50] according to robinson, the terraced crown "continue[s] the wedding cake layering of the building itself. this concept is carried forward from the 61st floor, whose eagle gargoyles echo the treatment of the 31st, to the spire, which extends the concept of 'higher and narrower' forward to infinite height and infinitesimal width. this unique treatment emphasizes the building's height, giving it an other worldly atmosphere reminiscent of the fantastic architecture of coney island or the far east."[39] television station wcbs tv (channel 2) originated its transmission from the top of the chrysler building in 1938.[51] wcbs tv transmissions were shifted to the empire state building in 1960[52] in response to competition from rca's transmitter on that building.[53] for many years wpat fm and wtfm (now wktu) also transmitted from the chrysler building, but their move to the empire state building by the 1970s ended commercial broadcasting from the structure.[52] the crown and spire are illuminated by a combination of fluorescent lights framing the crown's distinctive triangular windows and colored floodlights that face toward the building, allowing it to be lit in a variety of schemes for special occasions.[6] the v shaped fluorescent "tube lighting"   hundreds of 480v 40w bulbs framing 120 window openings[54]   was added in 1981, although it had been part of the original design.[55][56] until 1998, the lights were turned off at 2 a.m., but the new york observer columnist ron rosenbaum convinced tishman speyer to keep the lights on until 6 a.m.[57] since 2015, the chrysler building and other city skyscrapers have been part of the audubon society's lights out program, turning off their lights during bird migration seasons.[58] the interior of the building has several elements that were innovative when the structure was constructed. the partitions between the offices are soundproofed and divided into interchangeable sections, so the layout of any could be changed quickly and comfortably. pipes under the floors carry both telephone and electricity cables.[47] the topmost stories are the smallest in the building and have about 5,000 square feet (460 m2) each.[59] the lobby is triangular in plan,[60][61][42] connecting with entrances on lexington avenue, 42nd street, and 43rd street.[62] the lobby was the only publicly accessible part of the chrysler building by the 2000s.[63][64] the three entrances contain nirosta steel doors,[65] above which are etched glass panels that allow natural light to illuminate the space.[66] the floors contain bands of yellow travertine from siena, which mark the path between the entrances and elevator banks.[65][61][67][66] the writer eric nash described the lobby as a paragon of the art deco style, with clear influences of german expressionism.[5] chrysler wanted the design to impress other architects and automobile magnates, so he imported various materials regardless of the extra costs incurred.[62][68] the walls are covered with huge slabs of african red granite.[68][64][69] the walls also contain storefronts and doors made of nirosta steel.[65][66] there is a wall panel dedicated to the work of clinchers, surveyors, masons, carpenters, plasterers, and builders. fifty different figures were modeled after workers who participated in its construction.[70] in 1999, the mural was returned to its original state after a restoration that removed the polyurethane coating and filled in holes added in the 1970s.[71] originally, van alen's plans for the lobby included four large supporting columns, but they were removed after chrysler objected on the grounds that the columns made the lobby appear "cramped".[61] the lobby has dim lighting which combined with the appliqués of the lamps, create an intimate atmosphere and highlight the space.[68][67] vertical bars of fluorescent light are covered with belgian blue marble and mexican amber onyx bands, which soften and diffuse the light.[43][65][72] the marble and onyx bands are designed as inverted chevrons.[65][66] opposite the lexington avenue entrance is a security guard's desk topped by a digital clock.[67] the panel behind the desk is made of marble, surrounded by nirosta steel.[65][66] the lobby connects to four elevator banks, each of a different design.[21][61][73] to the north and south of the security desk are terrazzo staircases leading to the second floor and basement. the stairs contain marble walls and nirosta steel railings.[66][73] the outer walls are flat but are clad with marble strips that are slightly angled to each other, which give the impression of being curved.[43] the inner railings of each stair are designed with zigzagging art deco motifs, ending at red marble newel posts on the ground story. above each stair are aluminum leaf ceilings with etched glass chandeliers.[66][73] the ceiling contains a 110 by 67 foot (34 by 20 m) mural, transport and human endeavor, designed by edward trumbull. the mural's theme is "energy and man's application of it to the solution of his problems", and it pays homage to the golden age of aviation and the machine age.[71][61][67] the mural is painted in the shape of a "y" with ocher and golden tones. the central image of the mural is a "muscled giant whose brain directs his boundless energy to the attainment of the triumphs of this mechanical era", according to a 1930 pamphlet that advertised the building. the mural's art deco style is manifested in characteristic triangles, sharp angles, slightly curved lines, chrome ornaments, and numerous patterns.[71] the mural depicts several silver planes, including the spirit of st. louis, as well as furnaces of incandescent steel and the building itself.[70][5] when the building opened, the first and second floors housed a public exhibition of chrysler vehicles.[74] the exhibition, known as the chrysler automobile salon, was near the corner of lexington avenue and 42nd streets, and opened in 1936.[75] the ground floor featured "invisible glass" display windows,[76][77][78] a 51 foot (16 m) diameter turntable upon which automobiles were displayed, and a ceiling with lights arranged in concentric circles.[76][77][79] escalators led to the showroom's second floor where plymouths, dodges, and desotos were sold.[80] the chrysler salon remained operational through at least the 1960s.[81] there are 32 elevators in the skyscraper, clustered into four banks.[67][82] at the time of opening, 28 of the elevators were for passenger use.[83][73] each bank serves different floors within the building, with several "express" elevators going from the lobby to a few landings in between, while "local" elevators connect the landings with the floors above these intermediate landings.[84] as per walter chrysler's wishes, the elevators were designed to run at a rate of 900 feet per minute (270 m/min),[85] despite the 700 foot per minute (210 m/min) speed restriction enforced in all city elevators at the time.[47] this restriction was loosened soon after the empire state building opened in 1931, as that building had also been equipped with high speed elevators.[86] the chrysler building also had three of the longest elevator shafts in the world at the time of completion.[67][47] over the course of a year, van alen painstakingly designed these elevators with the assistance of l.t.m. ralston, who was in charge of developing the elevator cabs' mechanical parts.[82] the cabs were manufactured by the otis elevator company,[87] while the doors were made by the tyler company. the dimensions of each elevator were 5.5 feet (1.7 m) deep by 8 feet (2.4 m) wide.[82] within the lobby, there are ziggurat shaped mexican onyx panels above the elevator doors.[66] the doors are designed in a lotus pattern and are clad with steel and wood.[73] when the doors are closed, they resemble "tall fans set off by metallic palm fronds rising through a series of silver parabolas, whose edges were set off by curved lilies" from the outside, as noted by curcio. however, when a set of doors is open, the cab behind the doors resembles "an exquisite art deco room".[82] these elements were influenced by ancient egyptian designs, which significantly impacted the art deco style.[83] according to vincent curcio, "these elevator interiors were perhaps the single most beautiful and, next to the dome, the most important feature of the entire building."[82] even though the woods in the elevator cabs were arranged in four basic patterns, each cab had a unique combination of woods.[66][67][82] curcio stated that "if anything the building is based on patterned fabrics, [the elevators] certainly are. three of the designs could be characterized as having 'geometric', 'mexican' and vaguely 'art nouveau' motifs, which reflect the various influences on the design of the entire building."[82] the roof of each elevator was covered with a metal plate whose design was unique to that cab, which in turn was placed on a polished wooden pattern that was also customized to the cab. hidden behind these plates were ceiling fans.[83] curcio wrote that these elevators "are among the most beautiful small enclosed spaces in new york, and it is fair to say that no one who has seen or been in them has forgotten them".[82] curcio compared the elevators to the curtains of a ziegfeld production, noting that each lobby contains lighting that peaks in the middle and slopes down on either side.[82] the decoration of the cabs' interiors was also a nod to the chrysler corporation's vehicles: cars built during the building's early years had dashboards with wooden moldings.[5] both the doors and cab interiors were considered to be works of extraordinary marquetry.[88] on the 42nd street side of the chrysler building, a staircase from the street leads directly under the building to the new york city subway's 4, ​5, ​6, <6>​, 7, <7>​​, and s trains at grand central 42nd street station.[89] it is part of the structure's original design.[67][90] the interborough rapid transit company, which at the time was the operator of all the routes serving the 42nd street station, originally sued to block construction of the new entrance because it would cause crowding,[91] but the new york city board of transportation pushed to allow the corridor anyway.[92] chrysler eventually built and paid for the building's subway entrance.[47] work on the new entrance started in march 1930[93] and it opened along with the chrysler building two months later.[94] the basement also had a "hydrozone water bottling unit" that would filter tap water into drinkable water for the building's tenants. the drinkable water would then be bottled and shipped to higher floors.[95] the private cloud club formerly occupied the 66th through 68th floors.[56] it opened in july 1930 with some three hundred members, all wealthy males who formed the city's elite.[35][96][97] its creation was spurred by texaco's wish for a proper restaurant for its executives prior to renting fourteen floors in the building. the cloud club was a compromise between william van alen's modern style and walter chrysler's stately and traditional tastes.[96] a member had to be elected and, if accepted, paid an initial fee of $200, plus a $150 to $300 annual fee.[98] texaco executives comprised most of the cloud club's membership.[99] the club and its dining room may have inspired the rainbow room and the rockefeller center luncheon club at 30 rockefeller plaza.[100] there was a tudor style foyer on the 66th floor with oak paneling, as well as an old english style grill room with wooden floors, wooden beams, wrought iron chandeliers, and glass and lead doors.[67][35][96] the main dining room had a futuristic appearance, with polished granite columns and etched glass appliqués in art deco style.[67][97] there was a mural of a cloud on the ceiling and a mural of manhattan on the dining room's north side.[96][101] the 66th and 67th floors were connected by a renaissance style marble and bronze staircase.[67][97] the 67th floor had an open bar with dark wood paneling and furniture.[102] on the same floor, walter chrysler and texaco both had private dining rooms.[97][102] chrysler's dining room had a black and frosted blue glass frieze of automobile workers.[102][67] texaco's dining room contained a mural across two walls; one wall depicted a town in new england with a texaco gas station, while the other depicted an oil refinery and texaco truck. the south side of the 67th floor also contained a library with wood paneled walls and fluted pilasters.[102] the 68th floor mainly contained service spaces.[97] in the 1950s and 1960s, members left the cloud club for other clubs. texaco moved to westchester county in 1977,[99] and the club closed two years later.[96][103] although there have been several projects to rehabilitate the club or transform it into a disco or a gastronomic club, these plans have never materialized,[97][104] as then owner cooke reportedly did not want a "conventional" restaurant operating within the old club.[105] tishman speyer rented the top two floors of the old cloud club.[104] the old staircase has been removed, as have many of the original decorations,[97] which prompted objections from the art deco society of new york.[104] originally, walter chrysler had a two story apartment on the 69th and 70th floors with a fireplace and a private office. the office also contained a gymnasium and the loftiest bathrooms in the city.[106] the office had a medieval ambience with leaded windows, elaborate wooden doors, and heavy plaster.[67] chrysler did not use his gym much, instead choosing to stay at the chrysler corporation's headquarters in detroit.[64] subsequently, the 69th and 70th floors were converted into a dental clinic.[104] in 2005, a report by the new york times found that one of the dentists, charles weiss, had operated at the clinic's current rooftop location since 1969.[107] the office still had the suite's original bathroom and gymnasium.[104] chrysler also had a unit on the 58th through 60th floors, which served as his residence.[108] from the building's opening until 1945, it contained a 3,900 square feet (360 m2) observation deck on the 71st floor, called "celestial".[109][98] for fifty cents visitors could transit its circumference through a corridor with vaulted ceilings painted with celestial motifs and bedecked with small hanging glass planets.[5][98][110] the center of the observatory contained the toolbox that walter p. chrysler used at the beginning of his career as a mechanic;[56][50][47][111] it was later preserved at the chrysler technology center in auburn hills, michigan.[112] an image of the building resembling a rocket hung above it.[98] according to a contemporary brochure, views of up to 100 miles (160 km) were possible on a clear day;[110] but the small triangular windows of the observatory created strange angles that made viewing difficult, depressing traffic. when the empire state building opened in 1931 with two observatories at a higher elevation, the chrysler observatory lost its clientele.[50] after the observatory closed, it was used to house radio and television broadcasting equipment.[113] since 1986, the old observatory has housed the office of architects harvey morse and cowperwood interests.[113][114] the stories above the 71st floor are designed mostly for exterior appearance, functioning mainly as landings for the stairway to the spire and do not contain office space.[115] they are very narrow, have low and sloping roofs, and are only used to house radio transmitters and other mechanical and electrical equipment.[33] for example, the 73rd floor houses the motors of the elevators and a 15,000 us gallon (57,000 l) water tank, of which 3,500 us gallons (13,000 l) are reserved for extinguishing fires.[114] in the mid 1920s, new york's metropolitan area surpassed london's as the world's most populous metropolitan area[116] and its population exceeded ten million by the early 1930s.[117] the era was characterized by profound social and technological changes. consumer goods such as radio, cinema, and the automobile became widespread.[118] in 1927, walter chrysler's automotive company, the chrysler corporation, became the third largest car manufacturer in the united states, behind ford and general motors.[119] the following year, chrysler was named time magazine's "person of the year".[120][50] the economic boom of the 1920s and speculation in the real estate market fostered a wave of new skyscraper projects in new york city.[50] the chrysler building was built as part of an ongoing building boom that resulted in the city having the world's tallest building from 1908 to 1974.[121] following the end of world war i, european and american architects came to see simplified design as the epitome of the modern era and art deco skyscrapers as symbolizing progress, innovation, and modernity. the 1916 zoning resolution restricted the height that street side exterior walls of new york city buildings could rise before needing to be setback from the street.[a][124] this led to the construction of art deco structures in new york city with significant setbacks, large volumes, and striking silhouettes that were often elaborately decorated.[125][126] art deco buildings were constructed for only a short period of time; but because that period was during the city's late 1920s real estate boom, the numerous skyscrapers built in the art deco style predominated in the city skyline, giving it the romantic quality seen in films and plays.[32] the chrysler building project was shaped by these circumstances.[50] originally, the chrysler building was to be the reynolds building, a project of real estate developer and former new york state senator william h. reynolds.[38][10][33] prior to his involvement in planning the building, reynolds was best known for developing coney island's dreamland amusement park. when the amusement park was destroyed by a fire in 1911, reynolds turned his attention to manhattan real estate, where he set out to build the tallest building in the world.[38][10] in 1921, reynolds rented a large plot of land at the corner of lexington avenue and 42nd street with the intention of building a tall building on the site.[10][33][22] reynolds did not develop the property for several years, prompting the cooper union to try to increase the assessed value of the property in 1924. the move, which would force reynolds to pay more rent, was unusual because property owners usually sought to decrease their property assessments and pay fewer taxes.[127] reynolds hired the architect william van alen to design a forty story building there in 1927.[128] van alen's original design featured many modernist stylistic elements, with glazed, curved windows at the corners.[38] van alen was respected in his field for his work on the albemarle building at broadway and 24th street, designing it in collaboration with his partner h. craig severance.[129][130] van alen and severance complemented each other, with van alen being an original, imaginative architect and severance being a shrewd businessperson who handled the firm's finances.[131] the relationship between them became tense over disagreements on how best to run the firm.[128] a 1924 article in the architectural review, praising the albemarle building's design, had mentioned van alen as the designer in the firm and ignored severance's role.[132][133][134] the architects' partnership dissolved acrimoniously several months later, with lawsuits over the firm's clients and assets lasting over a year.[133][134] the rivalry influenced the design of the future chrysler building, since severance's more traditional architectural style would otherwise have restrained van alen's more modern outlook.[135] by february 2, 1928, the proposed building's height had been increased to 54 stories, which would have made it the tallest building in midtown.[136] the proposal was changed again two weeks later, with official plans for a 63 story building.[137] a little more than a week after that, the plan was changed for the third time, with two additional stories added.[138] by this time, 42nd street and lexington avenue were both hubs for construction activity, due to the removal of the third avenue elevated's 42nd street spur, which was seen as a blight on the area. the adjacent 56 story chanin building was also under construction. because of the elevated spur's removal, real estate speculators believed that lexington avenue would become the "broadway of the east side", causing a ripple effect that would spur developments farther east.[139] in april 1928, reynolds signed a 67 year lease for the plot and finalized the details of his ambitious project.[140] van alen's original design for the skyscraper called for a base with first floor showroom windows that would be triple height, and above would be 12 stories with glass wrapped corners, to create the impression that the tower was floating in mid air.[33][141] reynolds's main contribution to the building's design was his insistence that it have a metallic crown, despite van alen's initial opposition;[5] the metal and crystal crown would have looked like "a jeweled sphere" at night.[55] originally, the skyscraper would have risen 808 feet (246 m), with 67 floors.[6][142][141] these plans were approved in june 1928.[143] van alen's drawings were unveiled in the following august and published in a magazine run by the american institute of architects (aia).[144] reynolds ultimately devised an alternate design for the reynolds building, which was published in august 1928. the new design was much more conservative, with an italianate dome that a critic compared to governor al smith's bowler hat, and a brick arrangement on the upper floors that simulated windows in the corners, a detail that remains in the current chrysler building. this design almost exactly reflected the shape, setbacks, and the layout of the windows of the current building, but with a different dome.[33] with the design complete, groundbreaking for the reynolds building took place on september 19, 1928,[145] but by late 1928, reynolds did not have the means to carry on construction.[146] walter chrysler offered to buy the building in early october 1928,[147] and reynolds sold the plot, lease, plans, and architect's services to chrysler on october 15, 1928,[41][146][16] for more than $2.5 million.[148] that day, the goodwin construction company began demolition of what had been built.[149][16] a contract was awarded on october 28,[150] and demolition was completed on november 9.[149] chrysler's initial plans for the building were similar to reynolds's, but with the 808 foot building having 68 floors instead of 67. the plans entailed a ground floor pedestrian arcade; a facade of stone below the fifth floor and brick and terracotta above; and a three story bronze and glass "observation dome" at the top.[41][16] however, chrysler wanted a more progressive design, and he worked with van alen to redesign the skyscraper to be 925 ft (282 m) tall.[151] at the new height, chrysler's building would be taller than the 792 foot (241 m) woolworth building, a building in lower manhattan that was the world's tallest at the time.[152][16] at one point, chrysler had requested that van alen shorten the design by ten floors, but reneged on that decision after realizing that the increased height would also result in increased publicity.[153] from late 1928 to early 1929, modifications to the design of the dome continued.[128] in march 1929, the press published details of an "artistic dome" that had the shape of a giant thirty pointed star, which would be crowned by a sculpture five meters high.[85][33][154] the final design of the dome included several arches and triangular windows.[128] lower down, various architectural details were modeled after chrysler automobile products, such as the hood ornaments of the plymouth (see § facade).[33][6] the building's gargoyles on the 31st floor and the eagles on the 61st floor, were created to represent flight,[25] and to embody the machine age of the time.[33][6] even the topmost needle was built using a process similar to one chrysler used to manufacture his cars, with precise "hand craftmanship".[155] in his autobiography, chrysler says he suggested that his building be taller than the eiffel tower.[156][10] meanwhile, excavation of the new building's 69 foot deep (21 m) foundation began in mid november 1928[157][158] and was completed in mid january 1929, when bedrock was reached.[149] a total of 105,000,000 pounds (48,000,000 kg) of rock and 36,000,000 pounds (16,000,000 kg) of soil were excavated for the foundation, equal to 63% of the future building's weight.[158] construction of the building proper began on january 21, 1929.[149] the carnegie steel company provided the steel beams, the first of which was installed on march 27; and by april 9, the first upright beams had been set into place.[158] the steel structure was "a few floors" high by june 1929, 35 floors high by early august,[158] and completed by september.[50] despite a frantic steelwork construction pace of about four floors per week,[159] no workers died during the construction of the skyscraper's steelwork.[160] chrysler lauded this achievement, saying, "it is the first time that any structure in the world has reached such a height, yet the entire steel construction was accomplished without loss of life".[160] in total, 391,881 rivets were used,[161] and approximately 3,826,000 bricks were laid to create the non loadbearing walls of the skyscraper.[162] walter chrysler personally financed the construction with his income from his car company.[163] the chrysler building's height officially surpassed the woolworth's on october 16, 1929, thereby becoming the world's tallest structure.[164] the same year that the chrysler building's construction started, banker george l. ohrstrom proposed the construction of a 47 story office building at 40 wall street downtown, designed by van alen's former partner severance. shortly thereafter, ohrstrom expanded his project to 60 floors, but it was still shorter than the woolworth and chrysler buildings.[152] that april, severance increased 40 wall's height to 840 feet (260 m) with 62 floors, exceeding the woolworth's height by 48 feet (15 m) and the chrysler's by 32 feet (9.8 m).[152] 40 wall street and the chrysler building started competing for the title of "world's tallest building".[30][165][103] the empire state building, on 34th street and fifth avenue, entered the competition in 1929.[166] the race was defined by at least five other proposals, although only the empire state building would survive the wall street crash of 1929.[167][b] the "race into the sky", as popular media called it at the time, was representative of the country's optimism in the 1920s, which helped fuel the building boom in major cities.[166] van alen expanded the chrysler building's height to 925 feet (282 m), prompting severance to increase the height of 40 wall street to 927 feet (283 m) in april 1929.[103][169] construction of 40 wall street began that may and was completed twelve months later.[152] in response, van alen obtained permission for a 125 foot long (38 m) spire.[170][171][c] he had it secretly constructed inside the frame of the chrysler building,[44][169][153] ensuring that severance did not know the chrysler building's ultimate height until the end.[30] the spire was delivered to the site in four sections.[170] on october 23, 1929, one week after the chrysler building surpassed the woolworth building's height and one day before the wall street crash of 1929, the spire was assembled. according to one account, "the bottom section of the spire was hoisted to the top of the building's dome and lowered into the 66th floor of the building."[152] then, within 90 minutes the rest of the spire's pieces were raised and riveted in sequence,[172] raising the tower to 1,046 feet.[44][173][174] van alen, who witnessed the process from the street along with its engineers and walter chrysler,[173] compared the experience to watching a butterfly leaving its cocoon.[153][174] in the october 1930 edition of architectural forum, van alen explained the design and construction of the crown and needle:[175][50] a high spire structure with a needle like termination was designed to surmount the dome. this is 185 feet high and 8 feet square at its base. it was made up of four corner angles, with light angle strut and diagonal members, all told weighing 27 tons. it was manifestly impossible to assemble this structure and hoist it as a unit from the ground, and equally impossible to hoist it in sections and place them as such in their final positions. besides, it would be more spectacular, for publicity value, to have this cloud piercing needle appear unexpectedly. the steel tip brought the chrysler building to a height of 1,046 feet (319 m), greatly exceeding 40 wall street's height.[176][44] contemporary news media did not write of the spire's erection, nor were there any press releases celebrating the spire's erection. even the new york herald tribune, which had virtually continuous coverage of the tower's construction, did not report on the spire's installation until days after the spire had been raised.[177] chrysler realized that his tower's height would exceed the empire state building's as well, having ordered van alen to change the chrysler's original roof from a stubby romanesque dome to the narrow steel spire.[169] however, the empire state's developer john j. raskob reviewed the plans and realized that he could add five more floors and a spire of his own to his 80 story building[178] and acquired additional plots to support that building's height extension.[179][180] two days later, the empire state building's co developer, former governor al smith, announced the updated plans for that skyscraper, with an observation deck on the 86th floor roof at a height of 1,050 feet (320 m), higher than the chrysler's 71st floor observation deck at 783 feet (239 m).[178] in january 1930, it was announced that the chrysler corporation would maintain satellite offices in the chrysler building during automobile show week.[181] the skyscraper was never intended to become the chrysler corporation's headquarters, which remained in detroit.[182] the first leases by outside tenants were announced in april 1930, before the building was officially completed.[183][1] the building was formally opened on may 27, 1930, in a ceremony that coincided with the 42nd street property owners and merchants association's meeting that year. in the lobby of the building, a bronze plaque that read "in recognition of mr. chrysler's contribution to civic advancement" was unveiled. former governor smith, former assemblyman martin g. mccue, and 42nd street association president george w. sweeney were among those in attendance.[1][2] by june, it was reported that 65% of the available space had been leased.[184] by august, the building was declared complete, but the new york city department of construction did not mark it as finished until february 1932.[1] the added height of the spire allowed the chrysler building to surpass 40 wall street as the tallest building in the world and the eiffel tower as the tallest structure.[178] the chrysler building was thus the first man made structure to be taller than 1,000 feet (300 m)[185] and, by extension, the world's first supertall skyscraper.[4] as one newspaper noted, the tower was also taller than the highest points of five states.[186] the tower remained the world's tallest for 11 months after its completion.[4][187] the chrysler building was appraised at $14 million, but was exempt from city taxes per an 1859 law that gave tax exemptions to sites owned by the cooper union.[188] the city had attempted to repeal the tax exemption, but cooper union had opposed that measure.[189] because the chrysler building retains the tax exemption, it has paid cooper union for the use of their land since opening.[64] while the chrysler corporation was a tenant, it was not involved in the construction or ownership of the chrysler building; rather, the tower was a project of walter p. chrysler for his children.[33][44] in his autobiography, chrysler wrote that he wanted to erect the building "so that his sons would have something to be responsible for".[156][10] van alen's satisfaction at these accomplishments was likely muted by walter chrysler's later refusal to pay the balance of his architectural fee.[33] chrysler alleged that van alen had received bribes from suppliers, and van alen had not signed any contracts with walter chrysler when he took over the project.[128] van alen sued and the courts ruled in his favor, requiring chrysler to pay van alen $840,000, or six percent of the total budget of the building.[190] however, the lawsuit against chrysler markedly diminished van alen's reputation as an architect, which, along with the effects of the great depression and negative criticism, ended up ruining his career.[191][128] van alen ended his career as professor of sculpture at the nearby beaux arts institute of design and died in 1954. according to author neal bascomb, "the chrysler building was his greatest accomplishment, and the one that guaranteed his obscurity."[128] the chrysler building's distinction as the world's tallest building was short lived. john raskob realized the 1,050 foot empire state building would only be 4 feet (1.2 m) taller than the chrysler building,[178] and raskob was afraid that walter chrysler might try to "pull a trick like hiding a rod in the spire and then sticking it up at the last minute."[192] another revision brought the empire state building's roof to 1,250 feet (380 m), making it the tallest building in the world by far[193][194] when it opened on may 1, 1931.[3] however, the chrysler building is still the world's tallest steel supported brick building.[6] the chrysler building fared better commercially than the empire state building did: by 1935, the chrysler had already rented 70 percent of its floor area.[195] by contrast, empire state had only leased 23 percent of its space[196] and was popularly derided as the "empty state building".[197] the chrysler family inherited the property after the death of walter chrysler in 1940, with the property being under the ownership of w.p. chrysler building corporation.[198] in 1944, the corporation filed plans to build a 38 story annex to the east of the building, at 666 third avenue.[199] in 1949, this was revised to a 32 story annex costing $9 million.[200] the annex building, designed by reinhard, hofmeister & walquist,[201][202] had a facade similar to that of the original chrysler building. the stone for the original building was no longer manufactured, and had to be specially replicated.[203] construction started on the annex in june 1950,[204] and the first tenants started leasing in june 1951.[205] the building itself was completed by 1952,[201] and a sky bridge connecting the two buildings' seventh floors was built in 1959.[206] the family sold the building in 1953 to william zeckendorf[207][208] for its assessed price of $18 million.[209] the 1953 deal included the annex and the nearby graybar building, which, along with the chrysler building, sold for a combined $52 million. the new owners were zeckendorf's company webb and knapp, who held a 75% interest in the sale, and the graysler corporation, who held a 25% stake. at the time, it was reported to be the largest real estate sale in new york city's history.[210] in 1957, the chrysler building, its annex, and the graybar building were sold for $66 million to lawrence wien's realty syndicate, setting a new record for the largest sale in the city.[211] in 1960, the complex was purchased by sol goldman and alex dilorenzo,[212] who received a mortgage from the massachusetts mutual life insurance company.[213] the next year, the building's stainless steel elements, including the needle, crown, gargoyles, and entrance doors, were polished for the first time.[214][215] a group of ten workers steam cleaned the facade below the 30th floor, and manually cleaned the portion of the tower above the 30th floor, for a cost of about $200,000.[215] under goldman and dilorenzo's operation, the building began to develop leaks and cracked walls, and about 1,200 cubic yards (920 m3) of garbage piled up in the basement. the scale of the deterioration led one observer to say that the chrysler building was being operated "like a tenement in the south bronx".[208][216] the chrysler building remained profitable until 1974, when the owners faced increasing taxes and fuel costs.[217] foreclosure proceedings against the building began in august 1975, when goldman and dilorenzo defaulted on the $29 million first mortgage and a $15 million second mortgage.[218] the building was about 17 percent vacant at the time.[219] massachusetts mutual acquired the chrysler building for $35 million,[220] purchasing all the outstanding debt on the building via several transactions.[221] the next year, the chrysler building was designated as a national historic landmark.[7][222] texaco, one of the building's major tenants, was relocating to westchester county, new york, by then,[223] vacating hundreds of thousands of square feet at the chrysler building.[217][219] in early 1978, mass mutual devised plans to renovate the facade, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, elevators, lobby murals, and cloud club headquarters for $23 million.[220][224][221] at a press conference announcing the renovation, mayor ed koch proclaimed that "the steel eagles and the gargoyles of the chrysler building are all shouting the renaissance of new york".[208][220] massachusetts mutual had hired josephine sokolski, who had proposed modifying van alen's original lobby design substantially.[225][226] after the renovation was announced, the new york city landmarks preservation commission (lpc) considered designating the chrysler building as a city landmark.[220] though mass mutual had proclaimed "sensitivity and respect" for the building's architecture,[220] it had opposed the city landmark designation, concerned that the designation would hinder leasing.[227][208] at the time, the building had 500,000 square feet (46,000 m2) of vacant floor space, representing 40% of the total floor area.[220] the owners hired the edward s. gordon company as the building's leasing agent, and the firm leased 750,000 square feet (70,000 m2) of vacant space within five years.[228] the lpc designated the lobby and facade as city landmarks in september 1978.[208] massachusetts mutual had hired josephine sokolski to renovate the lobby, but the lpc objected that many aspects of sokolski's planned redesign had deviated too much from van alen's original design.[226][229] as a result of these disputes, the renovation of the lobby was delayed.[229] the building was sold again in august 1979, this time to entrepreneur and washington redskins owner jack kent cooke, in a deal that also transferred ownership of the los angeles kings and lakers to jerry buss.[230] at the time, the building was 96 percent occupied. the new owners hired kenneth kleiman of descon interiors to redesign the lobby and elevator cabs in a style that was much closer to van alen's original design.[225][231] cooke also oversaw the completion of a lighting scheme at the pinnacle, which had been part of the original design but was never completed.[231] the lighting system, consisting of 580 fluorescent tubes installed within the triangular windows of the top stories, was first illuminated in september 1981.[231][232] cooke next hired hoffman architects to restore the exterior and spire from 1995 to 1996.[231][233] the joints in the now closed observation deck were polished, and the facade restored, as part of a $1.5 million project. some damaged steel strips of the needle were replaced and several parts of the gargoyles were re welded together.[233] the cleaning received the new york landmarks conservancy's lucy g. moses preservation award for 1997.[234] cooke died in april 1997, and his mortgage lender fuji bank moved to foreclose on the building the next month.[235] shortly after fuji announced its intent to foreclose, several developers and companies announced that they were interested in buying the building.[236] ultimately, 20 potential buyers submitted bids to buy the chrysler building and several adjacent buildings.[237] tishman speyer properties and the travelers insurance group won the right to buy the building in november 1997, having submitted a bid for about $220 million (equal to $420 million in 2023). tishman speyer had negotiated a 150 year lease from the cooper union, which continued to own the land under the chrysler building.[207][238] in 1998, tishman speyer announced that it had hired beyer blinder belle to renovate the building and incorporate it into a commercial complex known as the chrysler center.[231][239] as part of this project, evergreene architectural arts restored the transport and human endeavor mural in the lobby, which had been covered up during the late 1970s renovation.[231][71] the renovation cost $100 million.[240] in 2001, a 75 percent stake in the building was sold for us$300 million (equal to $520 million in 2023) to tmw, the german arm of an atlanta based investment fund.[241] the building was 95 percent occupied by 2005.[242][243] in june 2008, it was reported that the abu dhabi investment council was in negotiations to buy tmw's 75 percent ownership stake, tishman speyer's 15 percent stake, and a share of the trylons retail structure next door for us$800 million.[244] the transaction was completed the next month, and the abu dhabi investment council assumed a 90 percent stake in the building, with tishman speyer retaining 10 percent.[245][246] tishman continued to manage the building and paid the cooper union $7.5 million a year.[242] from 2010 to 2011, the building's energy, plumbing, and waste management systems were renovated. this resulted in a 21 percent decrease in the building's total energy consumption and 64 percent decrease in water consumption. in addition, 81 percent of waste was recycled. in 2012, the building received a leed gold accreditation from the u.s. green building council, which recognized the building's environmental sustainability and energy efficiency.[247] the abu dhabi investment council and tishman speyer put the chrysler building's leasehold for sale again in january 2019.[248] that march, the media reported that aby rosen's rfr holding llc, in a joint venture with the austrian signa group, had reached an agreement to purchase the leasehold[249][250] at a steeply discounted $150 million.[251] in exchange, rosen had to pay the cooper union $32.5 million a year, a steep increase from the rate the previous leaseholders had paid.[59][252] rosen initially planned to convert the building into a hotel,[253] but he dropped these plans in april 2019, citing difficulties with the ground lease.[254] rosen then announced plans for an observation deck on the 61st story setback,[255] which the lpc approved in may 2020.[256] he also wanted to reopen the cloud club and attract multiple restaurateurs.[59] rosen sought to renegotiate the terms of his ground lease with cooper union in 2020,[257] and he evicted storeowners from all of the building's shops in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to renovate the retail space.[242][258] to attract tenants following the onset of the covid 19 pandemic in new york city in 2020,[259] he converted the chrysler building's ground floor space into a tenant amenity center.[260] rfr estimated that it had spent $170 million to renovate the building.[59] rfr and signa attempted to restructure the ground lease again in 2021 and 2023, both times without success.[59][261] by then, according to an anonymous source cited by curbed, rfr was losing an estimated $1 million a month from the chrysler building's operation.[59] in december 2023, signa's creditors ordered the company to sell its stake in the chrysler building, following signa's insolvency.[262] rfr offered to buy signa's ownership stake for a nominal fee of $1.[261] meanwhile, rfr sought to lease the building's retail space to luxury stores, signing their first luxury tenant in march 2024.[263] by mid 2024, the building was aging significantly, and rfr had listed about 650,000 square feet (60,000 m2) of the chrysler building's office space as being "immediately available for rent".[252][264] the new york times reported that employees had complained about pest infestations, fountains with brown water, weak cellular reception, elevator delays, and poor natural lighting.[264] additionally, it would cost millions of dollars to upgrade the building to meet modern energy efficiency codes.[242] the cooper union moved to terminate rfr's ground lease of the chrysler building in september 2024, and rfr sued the college to prevent the termination of its leasehold.[261][265] in its lawsuit, rfr claimed that the cooper union had driven away some tenants and had directed other tenants to make rent payments to the college rather than to rfr.[266] subsequently, the cooper union requested that rfr be evicted,[267] and a state judge ordered tenants to pay rent to the cooper union that october.[268] rfr's lease was ultimately terminated in january 2025.[269] chrysler center is the building complex consisting of the chrysler building to the west, chrysler building east to the east, and the chrysler trylons commercial pavilion in the middle. after tishman speyer had acquired the entire complex, the firm renovated it completely from 1998 to 2000.[270] the structure at 666 third avenue, known as the kent building at the time, was renovated and renamed chrysler building east.[270] this international style building, built in 1952,[201] is 432 feet (132 m) high and has 32 floors.[271][272] the mechanical systems were modernized and the interior was modified.[272][273] postmodern architect philip johnson designed a new facade of dark blue glass, which was placed about 4 inches (100 mm) in front of the kent building's existing facade.[231] the structure did not resemble its western neighbor; johnson explained that he did not "even like the architecture" of the chrysler building, despite acknowledging it as "the most loved building in new york".[274][239] his design also included a 135,000 square foot (12,500 m2) extension.[272][273] which surrounded the elevator core on the western end of the original kent building.[274][239] the expansion utilized 150,000 square feet (14,000 m2) of unused air rights above the buildings in the middle of the block.[231] the kent building was not a new york city designated landmark, unlike the chrysler building, so its renovation did not require the lpc's approval.[240] after the addition, the total area of the kent building was 770,000 square feet (72,000 m2).[275] a new building, also designed by philip johnson, was built between the original skyscraper and the annex.[276] this became the chrysler trylons, a commercial pavilion three stories high with a retail area of 22,000 square feet (2,000 m2).[270] its design consists of three triangular glass "trylons" measuring 57 ft (17 m), 68 ft (21 m), and 73 ft (22 m) tall; each is slanted in a different direction.[277][270] the trylons are supported by vertical steel mullions measuring 10 in (250 mm) wide; between the mullions are 535 panes of reflective gray glass.[270] the retail structures themselves are placed on either side of the trylons.[277] due to the complexity of the structural work, structural engineer severud associates built a replica at rimouski, quebec. johnson designed the chrysler trylons as "a monument for 42nd street [...] to give you the top of the chrysler building at street level."[270] after these modifications, the total leasable area of the complex was 2,062,772 square feet (191,637.8 m2).[275] the total cost of this project was about one hundred million dollars.[270] this renovation has won several awards and commendations, including an energy star rating from the environmental protection agency;[278] a leed gold designation;[247] and the skyscraper museum outstanding renovation award of 2001.[279] in january 1930, the chrysler corporation opened satellite offices in the chrysler building during automobile show week.[181] in addition to the chrysler salon product showroom on the first and second floors, the building had a lounge and a theater for showing films of chrysler products.[80] other original large tenants included time, inc. and texaco oil.[280] needing more office space,[281] time moved to rockefeller center in 1937.[282] texaco relocated to a more suburban workplace in purchase, new york, in 1977.[99] in addition, the offices of shaw walker and j. s. bache & company were immediately atop the chrysler salon, while a. b. dick, pan american world airways, adams hats, schrafft's, and florsheim shoes also had offices in the building.[283] by the 21st century, many of the chrysler building's tenants leased space there because of the building's historical stature, rather than because of its amenities.[264] notable modern tenants include: the completed chrysler building garnered mixed reviews in the press. van alen was hailed as the "doctor of altitude" by architect magazine, while architect kenneth murchison called van alen the "ziegfeld of his profession", comparing him to popular broadway producer florenz ziegfeld jr.[129][290] the building was praised for being "an expression of the intense activity and vibrant life of our day", and for "teem[ing] with the spirit of modernism, ... the epitome of modern business life, stand[ing] for progress in architecture and in modern building methods."[47][291][292] an anonymous critic wrote in architectural forum's october 1930 issue: "the chrysler...stands by itself, something apart and alone. it is simply the realization, the fulfillment in metal and masonry, of a one man dream, a dream of such ambitions and such magnitude as to defy the comprehension and the criticism of ordinary men or by ordinary standards."[50][115] walter chrysler himself regarded the building as a "monument to me".[264] the journalist george s. chappell called the chrysler's design "distinctly a stunt design, evolved to make the man in the street look up".[129][67] douglas haskell stated that the building "embodies no compelling, organic idea",[129] and alleged that van alen had abandoned "some of his best innovations in behalf of stunts and new 'effects'".[41] others compared the chrysler building to "an upended swordfish",[26][293] or claimed it had a "little nemo" like design.[26] lewis mumford, a supporter of the international style and one of the foremost architectural critics of the united states at the time, despised the building for its "inane romanticism, meaningless voluptuousness, [and] void symbolism".[118][294][47] the public also had mixed reviews of the chrysler building, as murchison wrote: "some think it's a freak; some think it's a stunt."[191][290] the architectural professor gail fenske said that, although the chrysler building was criticized as "too theatrical" at the time of its completion, the general public quickly took a liking to "the city's crowning skyscraper".[242] later reviews were more positive. architect robert a. m. stern wrote that the chrysler building was "the most extreme example of the [1920s and 1930s] period's stylistic experimentation", as contrasted with 40 wall street and its "thin" detailing.[295] george h. douglas wrote in 2004 that the chrysler building "remains one of the most appealing and awe inspiring of skyscrapers".[185] architect le corbusier called the building "hot jazz in stone and steel".[61] architectural critic ada louise huxtable stated that the building had "a wonderful, decorative, evocative aesthetic", while paul goldberger noted the "compressed, intense energy" of the lobby, the "magnificent" elevators, and the "magical" view from the crown.[296] anthony w. robins said the chrysler building was "one of a kind, staggering, romantic, soaring, the embodiment of 1920s skyscraper pizzazz, the great symbol of art deco new york".[297] kim velsey of curbed said that the building "is unabashedly over the top" because of "its steel gargoyles, moroccan marble lobby, and illuminated spire".[59] the lpc said that the tower "embodies the romantic essence of the new york city skyscraper".[10] pauline frommer, in the travel guide frommer's, gave the building an "exceptional" recommendation, saying: "in the chrysler building we see the roaring twenties version of what alan greenspan called 'irrational exuberance' a last burst of corporate headquarter building before stocks succumbed to the thudding crash of 1929."[298] the chrysler building appears in several films set in new york[299] and is widely considered one of the most positively acclaimed buildings in the city.[300][33] a 1996 survey of new york architects revealed it as their favorite, and the new york times described it in 2005 as "the single most important emblem of architectural imagery on the new york skyline".[118] in mid 2005, the skyscraper museum in lower manhattan asked 100 architects, builders, critics, engineers, historians, and scholars, among others, to choose their 10 favorites among 25 of the city's towers. the chrysler building came in first place, with 90 respondents placing it on their ballots.[301] in 2007, the building ranked ninth among 150 buildings in the aia's list of america's favorite architecture.[302] the chrysler building is widely heralded as an art deco icon. fodor's new york city 2010 described the building as being "one of the great art deco masterpieces"[303] which "wins many a new yorker's vote for the city's most iconic and beloved skyscraper".[63] frommer's states that the chrysler was "one of the most impressive art deco buildings ever constructed".[298] insight guides' 2016 edition maintains that the chrysler building is considered among the city's "most beautiful" buildings.[304] its distinctive profile has inspired similar skyscrapers worldwide, including one liberty place in philadelphia,[305] two prudential plaza in chicago,[306] and the al kazim towers in dubai.[307] in addition, the new york new york hotel and casino in paradise, nevada, contains the "chrysler tower",[308] a replica of the chrysler building measuring 35 or 40 stories tall.[309][310] a portion of the hotel's interior was also designed to resemble the chrysler building's interior.[309] while seen in many films, the chrysler building almost never appears as a main setting in them, prompting architect and author james sanders to quip it should win "the award for best supporting skyscraper".[299] the building was supposed to be featured in the 1933 film king kong, but only makes a cameo at the end thanks to its producers opting for the empire state building in a central role.[299] the chrysler building appears in the background of the wiz (1978); as the setting of much of q   the winged serpent (1982); in the initial credits of the shadow of the witness (1987); and during or after apocalyptic events in independence day (1996), armageddon (1998), deep impact (1998), godzilla (1998), and a.i. artificial intelligence (2001).[299] the building also appears in other films, such as spider man (2002),[311] fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer (2007),[312] two weeks notice (2002),[299] the sorcerer's apprentice (2010),[313] the avengers (2012)[314] and men in black 3 (2012).[264][315] the building is mentioned in the number "it's the hard knock life" for the musical annie,[316] and it is the setting for the post game content in the squaresoft video game parasite eve.[317] in addition, the introductory scenes of the tv show sex and the city depict the chrysler building.[264] in december 1929, walter chrysler hired margaret bourke white to take publicity images from a scaffold 400 feet (120 m) high.[318][319][320] she was deeply inspired by the new structure and especially smitten by the massive eagle's head figures projecting off the building.[321] according to one account, bourke white wanted to live in the building for the duration of the photo shoot, but the only person able to do so was the janitor, so she was instead relegated to co leasing a studio with time inc.[296] in 1930, several of her photographs were used in a special report on skyscrapers in the then new fortune magazine.[322] bourke white worked in a 61st floor studio designed by john vassos[318][296] until she was evicted in 1934.[296] that year, bourke white's partner oscar graubner took a famous photo called "margaret bourke white atop the chrysler building", which depicts her taking a photo of the city's skyline while sitting on one of the 61st floor eagle ornaments.[318][323] on october 5, 1998, christie's auctioned the photograph for $96,000.[324] the chrysler building has been the subject of other photographs as well. during a january 1931 dance organized by the society of beaux arts, six architects, including van alen, were photographed while wearing costumes resembling the buildings that each architect designed.[325] in 1991, the photographer annie leibovitz took pictures of the dancer david parsons reclining on a ledge near the top of the building.[326]

in this episode, i speak with harry krejsa of carnegie mellon about why cybersecurity experts and clean energy advocates need to work together. drawing from his white house experience, krejsa explains how a modernized clean energy grid could actually help defend against china's cyberthreats   for the benefit of both peaceniks and natsec hawks. (pdf transcript)(active transcript) david roberts hey, hey, hey, everyone. this is volts for february 5, 2025, "the cyber security implications of a clean energy grid." i'm your host, david roberts. last year fbi director christopher wray warned congress that china is engaged in large scale efforts to hack vulnerable us infrastructure, including the us electricity grid. agencies like the government accountability office have warned for years about the grid's increasing vulnerability. into that milieu, we are introducing gigawatts of clean energy, which tends to involve systems that are much more digital and online and interconnected than their fossil fuel predecessors. is all that new "smart" tech going to increase vulnerability to chinese hackers? or can it help guard against them? harry krejsa has lots of thoughts on that subject. until recently, he was working in the biden white house, helping to develop the 2023 national cybersecurity strategy. now, he is the director of studies at the carnegie mellon institute for strategy & technology, from whence he has just released a new white paper with the somewhat overheated title “sun shield: how clean tech & america’s energy expansion can stop chinese cyber threats.” so, will clean energy be a cyber shield or a cyber vulnerability? we're going to dig into all the details. share all right then. so, with no further ado, harry krejsa, welcome to volts. thank you so much for coming. harry krejsa thank you for having me. i'm honored to be here. david roberts this is a subject of much fascination for me, and i feel like it's an undercovered subject that's going to be covered a lot more in the coming years. so, i'm glad to get here on the front edge of it. but i'll just tell you, just putting my cards on the table up front, i am, in my heart of hearts, a dirty hippie, what they used to call a peacenik, and as such, have what i think of as a pretty healthy skepticism toward the us security apparatus and us security agencies. so, i will just say that when christopher wray comes to congress, in the context of asking congress for a bunch more money and says, "ah, there are chinese hackers everywhere, they're behind you right now. they're probably under your desk, like, this is a looming threat, we need lots more money." i am   my eyebrow goes up. and i kept reading these articles about the chinese threat and one thing i thought was notable is that at no point does anyone say, "the chinese hacked us infrastructure and then did x, had x effect, caused x damage, x dollars of damage." it's all "they're preparing and lurking and they're out there just waiting." so, you see where i'm coming from as a peacenik. all of this sounds like classic us security apparatus threat inflation to me somewhat. so, i want to just start by maybe you can just convince me that there's a real and pressing threat here. harry krejsa certainly. and that skepticism that you mentioned is a healthy one. and it's why i was excited to come talk to you and the volts audience, who i imagine probably share some of that skepticism. skepticism that i also shared coming into this space. i'm a chinese linguist by training. i began my career working in china and taiwan. and when i came back stateside, i started researching us china technology competition, which brought me into government service. i started in the pentagon on their civilian staff during the first trump administration. and then after the biden transition, i took a political appointment into the white house. and across that time in government, i was the most granola crunching person i knew at the pentagon, but   david roberts probably a pretty low bar. harry krejsa indeed, but i cleared it. but during that time, i learned all about how and why china's building these kinds of cyber capabilities to threaten our infrastructure, and to my pleasant surprise, how clean energy could be uniquely capable of helping protect us from exactly those kinds of threats. there's a cliché that the thing that americans most frequently get wrong about international relations is that other countries have domestic politics too. david roberts i thought they just sat around talking about america. like, "what do you think about america?" harry krejsa well, i think that might be the case in lots of places and that their politics also reflect that part of our politics. but yeah, they have their own internal considerations, as it turns out. the domestic politics of china, the people's republic of china, revolve specifically around the chinese communist party's obsession with remaining in power and protecting itself against challenges to its legitimacy. that includes decades of talking points about how democracy and democratic values are just not appropriate for or compatible with chinese history and culture. the problem with that line of argument is, of course, taiwan. you know, taiwan is this flourishing, self governing democracy of 25 million people who have the same chinese lingual and historical heritage. david roberts kind of embarrassing that it's just sitting right there, next door. harry krejsa yes, and its continued existence, as you said, is an embarrassment and a source of frustration for the chinese communist party, one that xi jinping has said in speeches he does not intend to pass on to a successor. so, it's been widely reported that he's told his military to be prepared to violently conquer taiwan by the end of the decade. these preparations include a buildup of arms and ammunition, construction of amphibious landing craft to cross the hundred mile strait of taiwan, and storm its beaches. we can see these craft from space. but it also includes preparing to kneecap the united states so that we cannot come to taiwan's rescue. david roberts yeah, i was going to say the last i heard, and i haven't followed this closely, but the last i heard, biden was asked very straightforwardly, "will you step in if they go after taiwan?" and he said very straightforwardly, "yes." so, as far as i know, the us government's position, correct me if i'm wrong, is still "this will trigger action on our part." harry krejsa we have historically had a strategic ambiguity about that answer. and so, that level of explicitness, there's been some debate about what was said and what was meant and all that. david roberts whether biden was fully in control of all the implications of his speech, you mean? harry krejsa right, but that is probably why china has not done so yet. and in addition to the political affinity that we share with taiwan, being a long time partner and democratic friend, the global semiconductor market is centralized in taiwan to a tremendous degree. and so, any kind of violent confrontation over taiwan would be very likely to damage the famously fragile semiconductor manufacturing base there and could, you know, as a result, plunge the globe into a worldwide catastrophic depression. david roberts and this was, if i'm not mistaken, a large part of the impetus for the chips act. right. i mean, it's the whole reason we're trying to onshore that industry. harry krejsa precisely, precisely in partnership with taiwan. though that dependency does help give them more confidence in our friendship and willingness to come to their rescue in the event of such a violent takeover. david roberts right. so, it's really just all down to taiwan? like, i mean, there are larger, major power maneuvering considerations going on here, surely? harry krejsa sure. and i think that taiwan is more of the lens through which the general two last superpowers standing kind of dynamics are unfolding, right? david roberts yeah, yeah. harry krejsa and unfortunately, it's a very sharp lens through which that is coming together. we know that these kinds of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure are not science fiction because we've seen them unfold elsewhere. just a decade ago, russia was able to bring down ukraine's power grid with a series of cyber attacks that plunged hundreds of thousands of people into darkness. at the beginning of the biden administration in 2021, colonial pipeline suffered a ransomware attack by criminal gangs that caused a fuel shortage and momentary gas panics on the eastern seaboard. there was even a water treatment plant in florida where, again, a criminal actor was able to remotely access the control systems for that water treatment plant and set it to flood its water stores with lye. but that was, like, caught and reversed at the last minute. david roberts yeesh. harry krejsa yeah. david roberts it's also the case that, like, three drunk rednecks in north carolina shot an electricity transformer and shut down electricity service to an enormous swath of the region. by which i mean, us infrastructure is vulnerable in a lot of ways. and it seems to me a lot of those ways are domestic. entirely domestic. and a lot of those ways are analog. do you know what i mean? harry krejsa absolutely. david roberts so what percentage of the total vulnerability of us infrastructure is foreign digital hacking specifically? i guess i want to try to contextualize it a little bit. harry krejsa so, it's qualitatively different buckets. right. you know, it's difficult to protect a random rural substation against anti government activists from shooting it up with an m16. right. but that is not very systemically impactful. it could have a local impact. but the threat advisories put out over the last year and a half or so by microsoft and reporting by various news outlets and those congressional testimonies you mentioned have all been pointing to the chinese security services attempting to gain access for systemic impact into places like, again, according to publicly available reporting, the texas power grid, water utilities in hawaii and guam, major west coast ports, things that, because of their digital connectivity, are able to leverage it into systemic impact for two effects, right. the first one is to scramble our logistical ability to mobilize a rescue mission for taiwan. but the second, as you mentioned from director wray, was to disrupt essential services for us civilians, and as another government leader put it, to "induce societal panic" so that we wouldn't have the political will to support that rescue mission. david roberts so, the idea is that this is all basically to thwart any us effort to save taiwan? it seems like a little bit of, like a bank shot. well, wait, aren't they more direct? harry krejsa the chinese communist party sees the united states as probably the only actor that could stand in the way of a violent takeover of taiwan. and so, they're doing everything they can. they're pursuing missiles that are particularly good at targeting and taking down aircraft carriers because that's one of our comparative advantages. they are trying to bulk up on ammunitions that can get to taiwan and destroy taiwan's defenses before our ships can make it across the pacific ocean. but they do see our disproportionate digitization as a society, as an economy, as a way that they could try and circumvent our conventional military advantage. and that's what's motivating them. david roberts and i think they also view us as kind of lush, decadent, weak willed, and unlikely to put up with much sacrifice in the name of defending a faraway land. harry krejsa that is correct. i think that they might be off there as far as like a "rally around the flag" technique if they indeed started trying to target american civilians. but whether or not   in like, china analysis circles, it is a truism that china has generally been bad at predicting the political intuition for democratic countries. like, they just don't have practice at it. in the 90s, taiwan was flirting with electing a more pro independence party for the first time. and so, china fired a series of missiles over taiwan to try and intimidate them out of it. and of course, that just inspired taiwan to rally around those candidates. david roberts it sparked weeks long rallies and people in the streets. harry krejsa exactly right. and so, that's like, i think, an underrated source of instability. david roberts well, i mean, the inability to predict the us response is one thing. the inability to predict a trump administration response is perfectly forgivable and understandable as it is. harry krejsa exactly. but i think that the fact that we have now found chinese hackers lurking on civilian critical infrastructure, gaining and maintaining access and the ability to control it, including infrastructure that doesn't have a military purpose. david roberts right. but to be clear, the examples we have on record are them gaining access. we can't really point to them having done anything with it yet, can we? harry krejsa absolutely. but part of that is because doing something with that would be seen as an act of war, like targeting civilians. right. so, what you would want, if you are the prc and you want to, you know, frighten or deter the american people out of coming to taiwan's rescue, you want to be in place to pull the trigger. david roberts keeping your powder dry. harry krejsa precisely. david roberts but accumulating powder. harry krejsa exactly. david roberts all right. and explain what volt typhoon is in the context of this. harry krejsa sure. volt typhoon is a taxonomic moniker, a code name that microsoft's threat intelligence shop gave to a part of the chinese military, the people's liberation army, or pla, that has particular expertise, tactics that they can recognize over time and track to different kinds of targets. and so, volt typhoon is this corner of the pla that has been   with particular skill and stealth   embedding itself in various critical infrastructure networks, those power grids, water utilities, ports, et cetera. and microsoft unveiled this in, i believe, late 2023. david roberts so, it was a private microsoft investigation that uncovered all this stuff. harry krejsa it's often   there is a fair amount of collaboration in both the unclassified and classified spaces where governments and threat intelligence firms will pass information and say, "are you seeing this? do you have context for that?" indeed, microsoft was able to track this down in the public domain. that also allowed the united states to connect a few more dots together and provide that context and declassify intelligence for congress to do that. david roberts did the chinese communist party ever acknowledge volt typhoon or admit, or is it all full denial down the line? harry krejsa it is all full denial down the chain. and this has been the case forever, including when, like, we are able to track the forensics of various hacking operations. and they all, like, start at 8 a.m. shanghai time and conclude at 5 p.m. shanghai time. like, you know, they're getting much better at their tradecraft. but even when it has been obvious, they have a, you know, "we will never acknowledge this" sort of posture, of course. david roberts and let us not be naive. surely, there are groups of americans working to penetrate chinese infrastructure systems. do you not think? harry krejsa well, surely i would not be naive, but i don't have anything further to say about that. david roberts we should just deny that all down the line, too. harry krejsa i would say that the united states observes international standards and norms around the law of war and humanitarian protection, and targeting civilians in peacetime is not something that we or our allies do. david roberts okay, well, i'll just leave that there with my raised eyebrow. so, let's talk then about the vulnerability of the grid, basically. this is about the digital vulnerability of the grid. so, before we get to clean energy, the grid that all these people are talking about being more vulnerable is, for the most part, not composed of clean energy. the one that we're talking about being increasingly vulnerable is still mostly the fossil fuel grid. so, why, given that the grid has been basically the way it is for like, a century now, why is it suddenly becoming more vulnerable to hackers? harry krejsa so, you had mentioned at the top those gao reports about how the threat is proliferating. basically, the dynamic here is if you're trying to think of the cybersecurity of a complex system like our grid, you can think of your options along a spectrum. on one end, you have basically no internet connectivity whatsoever. in tech policy, we call that an air gap where there's nothing connected to the internet. david roberts certain nerds in the audience right now will be thinking about battlestar galactica. harry krejsa precisely, the adama maneuver, that's right. david roberts "reboot," which begins with a fully analog ship, because the robots have taken over all the computers. harry krejsa exactly. and there are benefits to that approach. indeed, some extremely valuable but extremely fragile parts of our infrastructure, of our national security apparatus, are indeed air gapped and they depend on that kind of thing. david roberts oh, interesting, because i was going to ask like, is that a substantial part of anyone's recommendations that we sort of have like some percentage, some small percentage of power infrastructure air gapped, just in case? harry krejsa it depends on particular circumstances. i think the issue is like the opposite end of that kind of spectrum of security perspectives from the air gap is leaning in totally on being digitally native, on recognizing that, you know, we are living in a digitally enabled world. the ship has sailed on, you know, some parts of our infrastructure being connected to the internet. so, we might as well. david roberts the only way out is through. harry krejsa exactly, exactly. and so, you want to say, "all right, we're going to make everything as digitally native as possible, where it can be updated, it can be patched, it can, you know, fail gracefully and quarantine the bad stuff." unfortunately, where we are is in that messy middle, which is the worst of all worlds. i'm exaggerating when i say, "dams with dial up modems slapped to the side of it," but only slightly. david roberts so, we have infrastructure that was not designed to be digital, not digitally native, that has been sort of drafted into digitization, slapped a modem on the side of it. and so, we're kind of in a worse of both worlds. harry krejsa exactly, exactly. and the promising thing about the clean energy transition is that it is bringing a wave of recapitalization into the electricity sector of new technology that is digitally native, that can be made defensible. david roberts right. and here we come to, i think, a really central question because, like my strong, i guess i'm guessing probably anyone's strong intuition is just that if you bring in much more digital equipment, you are proliferating your threat surfaces or whatever the hell they call them in the security world, you know what i mean? like, you have now digital interfaces by the millions. and what's more, i mean, i'm getting a little ahead of myself now, but we'll get all this out now. what's more, not just lots more digital equipment onto the grid, but digital equipment coming from small vendors and like mom and pop shops, like startups. you know, there's lots of   now there's like, it's not just a couple of big power companies that you could theoretically corral and control. we're proliferating the places from which things enter the grid too. and, it's just that's distributing too. so all of that sounds to me like more vulnerability. more, more, more. so convince me that a distributed grid filled with digital interfaces is not more vulnerable to hackers. harry krejsa absolutely. and your intuition is correct and historically well supported. but as we said earlier, the only way out is through here. and so, it is both simultaneously true that the threat surface is proliferating exponentially and we are gathering the tools we need to make everything more secure, resilient, and defensible than it would have been in a legacy fossil infrastructure paradigm otherwise. one of the analogies that i like to use is basically the fire code before the 20th century. you know, in the 19th century, you hear all these stories about how like, chicago and london and every developed city, every few years would have a citywide fire that would wipe out a tinderbox of all these buildings. right? because every piece of our built environment was contributing to risk, right? unregulated materials, unregulated stoves. and people didn't have an intuition for how flammability worked. and so, you were just, everything was a tinderbox and you would have catastrophic wipeouts every few years. and if we approached the built environment today, like our cybersecurity paradigm is today, i'd be saying, "hey, before you go into this building, you need to put on your fire suit, your own oxygen tank, and carry an axe with you," which is no way to organize our modern society. but instead, today, every piece of a building contributes to its safety rather than its risk. like, every layer of paint has had a fire retardant coat and everything. david roberts right, right. and this is all just by boosting code so that all new buildings have a certain level of hardened infrastructure to them. and it more or less worked. harry krejsa more or less worked. but also, with that boosting of code, was also an intuition. like, you know, "oh, there's paper towels on the stove, i should move that." or like there is, you know, the individual is not in charge of their own fire safety alone by themselves anymore. but there's still an intuition of safety that you can see when things feel off. and we are trying to   the way through this is to cultivate both, you know, that pincer movement of top down and bottom up. david roberts right, top down being the codes. bottom up meaning more of like a cultural sensitivity. harry krejsa just exactly right. david roberts pay more attention, care more, keep an eye out. but that's like you're trying to cultivate a culture again among, potentially, hundreds of thousands of small vendors. so that almost seems more challenging than the codes. harry krejsa absolutely. and it's hundreds of thousands of, as you said, peaceniks, folks who have, you know, people coming from the climate and clean energy sort of pipeline. david roberts not security minded people, maybe. harry krejsa precisely. right, and it is true in the other direction as well. when we were in the white house working on this issue, my glowering, risk focused national security folks would look up from their keyboards and say, "wait, you're doing what to my power grid?" david roberts they'd sniff the air. "is that patchouli somewhere?" harry krejsa precisely. whereas indeed, the climate policy folks whom i adored and had a great relationship with at the very beginning were like, "wait a second, are you trying to throw a wet blanket on this? are you coming in here with your military industrial complex biases?" when in reality, their worlds have way more common cause than i think they necessarily appreciate. david roberts yeah, yeah, i should have maybe framed that a little bit better in the intro. like the thrust of your piece, the whole thrust of this project, is to get the glowering security folks in the security blob and the hippies doing clean energy just to talk to each other and start cooperating and collaborating more, because they are, like, physically now part of the same concern. but culturally, i think you'll know better than anybody, still quite worlds apart. harry krejsa absolutely. and i think that this union will be especially important in the next few years, where we're going into a political environment where decarbonization is probably going to drop several rungs down the priority ladder, and national security and competition with china is going to move up it. david roberts well, i mean, you could argue, i would argue that even in the biden administration, it was concerns about china that pushed climate legislation over the top. it's already, you know, that's   those melding of concerns is already somewhat underway. harry krejsa that's right. and the ability of clean energy to kind of clear out that technical debt and make our grid more defensible and resilient is a huge national security asset and imperative. and you can talk about that without ever using the word carbon in a very compelling way. david roberts right, right. well, let's talk then a little bit   like, one of the points you make, which of course i love, because i love talking about grid architecture, is just that the architecture of a clean energy grid in and of itself is more cybersecure. so, talk about that just for a second. the sort of benefits of this kind of nested architecture. harry krejsa absolutely. so, as your audience will know well, we are moving from this paradigm of a few centralized nodes of electricity generation pushing electricity out in one direction to distribution into various neighborhoods, to one that is dramatically more flexible and interconnected, where we have distributed generation   electricity capable of moving up and down the same wires in both directions all the time. and that kind of architecture, if implemented thoughtfully and with security benefits in mind, can be a second pillar of national security benefit here because it's able to recover. and as our mutual friend costa samaras at the scott institute at carnegie mellon   david roberts former volts guest. harry krejsa precisely, he refers to this as "a self healing kind of system" where you can have, whether it's a hurricane or a hacker who takes down some portion of the grid, you can have smart inverters and grid forming technologies and batteries say, "whoa, i detect something bad happening there." and i can surge electricity of the right frequency to try and restabilize the grid, or failing that, i can quarantine off that portion that is being disrupted. david roberts yeah, that's the key bit. so, like electricity heads will remember, like in the massive blackouts of years past, it's often just like one squirrel eats through one transformer and the faults just cascade and there are no natural fire breaks, so they just cascade out of control through an entire region. and the idea here is that your clean energy grid, you know, people will remember this from several previous pods with octopus energy with lorenzo kristov. this idea of like at the neighborhood level, you have a microgrid, right, where everyone's communicating with one another within the microgrid, but that microgrid just has one single connection to the larger grid. and then, that could be inside a city sized microgrid, which could be inside a regional sized microgrid. there's this nested quality. all of which means there's tons of fire breaks. so, you can isolate the fault relatively easily with that kind of architecture in place. harry krejsa exactly. there was a squirrel in ohio in 2003 that did almost as much damage to the eastern seaboard as vladimir putin did to ukraine in 2015. but that is like   david roberts but here we come to a question, which is: that architecture, well implemented, is safer, but like, do we see that being implemented that way? do you know what i mean? what i see is an uncoordinated herd of just a chaos of people storming onto the grid, and the architecture not really keeping up. harry krejsa that's right. and i think that the answer is like, it's hard to know in many cases because we don't have the visibility that we need. and we can get that from uniting the tree huggers and the dragon slayers, both inside government and outside more effectively. in the critical infrastructure protection space, there are these public private coordinating bodies, sectoral coordinating councils, where representatives from the various major private sector stakeholders for a given sector will gather, will interface with government, will receive threat intelligence about what they should do to protect themselves against new and emerging risks, and they will translate that and send recommended actions out to their private sector counterparts. and those sectoral coordinating councils have been slow to modernize and reflect the clean energy space. david roberts you mean the ones in electricity specifically? harry krejsa yes, that's right. yes. so, like last year, the electricity subsector coordinating council (escc), which serves this role for the electricity, the bulk power sector, admitted american clean power (acp) as the representative for the clean energy space. but that took a long time. it took longer than it should have. and well after clean energy had a systemic level presence on our grid. but that was for two reasons from both directions. one was the kind of creaking institutions that came before; they were used to legacy energy actors that had been unchanging for decades, kind of not being prepared to integrate those new entrants. but also, from the other direction, the new entrants not knowing how to organize themselves, not necessarily having the intuition for security and knowledge that they should be there. and we have work to do to ensure that the liability of that space, of the diffuse number of actors, can be an asset of dynamism and technological innovation. but it has to work from both ends. david roberts well, before we get to governance, which we are going to talk about in a sec, let's just talk for a minute about the tech itself. you have an interesting observation in here about the difference between it and ot, between information technology and operational technology. talk a little bit about what that distinction is and what is the significance of that distinction here. harry krejsa so, information technology is what you often think of when we talk about tech today, right? like computers, internet networks, those kinds of machines. whereas operational technology, ot, is often used to describe a category of stuff that changes things in the real world. pumps and switches and substations. david roberts so, the former is sending information hither and thither, the latter is moving physical objects in the physical world. harry krejsa exactly, yeah. the atoms and bits distinction, right? yes. and for most of the existence of it, it has been generally separate from ot. there's been relatively rare intersections of the two. and we're moving into the world where they are colliding. even before the clean energy transition began, you know, we were slapping those dial up modems on the sides of dams. and there's a business case that's irresistible for that kind of work to bring together it and ot. any infrastructure operator is going to have distant and remote substations or assets that are difficult, time consuming, or dangerous to send someone to. and so, if you're wanting to just every so often adjust some gauges and flip some switches and you don't want to send someone out there every single time, then it is irresistible to slap a dial up modem to the side of that dam and have the ability to do that. but a lot of those dials, switches, and operational technologies were never designed with that kind of connection to the outside world in mind. like the designers of those technologies, they assumed if you wanted to flip that switch, you were going to walk into that building. the guard would say, "hey, david!" and that is the paradigm that it was built for. and by slapping it onto the side of it, we are opening this door to the entire world. being able to look in there and turn those knobs and flip those switches with no identity checks, no authentication, no firebreaks, unless you build it in intentionally on top of it. and that is just not the case in most of these places. a lot of utility operators have extremely narrow margins. many of them do not have the kind of technical sophistication to know that this is a problem. and unless you take action to swap out those ot so that they have a layer of sophistication on top of it to be like, "hey, is this who i expect to be coming in here and turning the knobs and flipping the switches?" david roberts but why can't you build that sophistication into the modem that you slap onto the side of it? like why do you have to rebuild the thing from the ground up? harry krejsa well, you can, but that's a single point of failure. in it right now, the big kind of trend is towards what's called "zero trust architecture" where you have to be authenticated every time you go to a new folder, a new place. and so, this is not to get into too much inside baseball, but the security paradigm for like government networks used to be organized around on premises or on prem security where as long as you passed one check, you could look at anything, go anywhere. and now we're moving toward like you are continuously authenticated. it is more like if you're working on collaborative google docs, right. you have to be signed into google, and the browser needs to know that that's you before you can open that link from someone else who only meant to share it with you and not everyone else who has the url. david roberts right, right. harry krejsa and so, similarly, like you want that kind of digitally native layers of security. which, to a human user, would hopefully look like nothing. it would be the easiest thing in the world if you're doing it right. but it is a sophisticated amount of engineering on the back end and in most cases, your old ot is not capable of that. and you could build everything you want to into that modem you slapped onto the side of it. but if it is a single point of failure, that's an intolerable amount of risk. and the rule of thumb we have for these, these state based hackers is they have so many resources and so much patience to throw at this that they will eventually get in. like the key is how many layers of defense and how resilient you are to recover. david roberts and so, one of the points you make is that the ot involved in clean energy is sort of better suited to this sort of security. harry krejsa correct. david roberts say a little word about that. harry krejsa sure. so, there's kind of two dynamics there. one is a lot of clean energy was just designed from the ground up in the internet era and so started with that as an assumed possibility. but the other part of it was that you need your clean energy technologies to be capable of much more sophisticated activity. and so, of course, you're going to design it with software defined abilities to interact with each other. right? david roberts right. yeah. like everything is going to be talking to everything else and talking to the grid. that's sort of like the tidal movement in clean energy. this is a big part of why clean energy proponents think clean energy is going to be able to do what dirty energy used to do. it's not going to have to replicate the brute force. it's going to, through digitization, be a lot smarter and then more efficient. harry krejsa exactly. your variable source generation, like solar and wind power, needs to be constantly considering, "where do i send this power? am i storing it? am i transforming, transmitting it across space or time?" and your future energy parks that you discussed in an episode recently of on prem generation and consumption is now introducing new multivariate interactions with the grid. like all the things you want your clean energy technologies to be able to do require software defined interactions with the real world. like from the start on the tin. david roberts right. so, what you like here, what we would like to happen, is for these digital technologies to be built with top level security built in such that every piece you add to the grid improves   rather than making the grid more vulnerable   it improves grid security. harry krejsa exactly. david roberts this is what we want in our future. but then, we come to the sort of million dollar question here, which is governance. what standards and who is it that's making people do this? because as you say in your section on governments, the first part of the section on governance is the governance of the us electricity system is an absolute jalopy, rube goldberg nightmare of overlapping jurisdictions. so, it's not even clear if you had a sort of us god emperor with great standards in his back pocket, how he would proliferate them to all the necessary actors here. so, how do you get around that? harry krejsa well, you know, federalism is a drag. david roberts although, we should just say here, in the coming four years, we might feel much more fondly towards federalism than we do right now. harry krejsa you're absolutely correct. and you know, man, i was just thinking about how great greg abbott is with all that clean energy in texas. david roberts i know. go, greg. harry krejsa yep. the way i think that you start   what's that line about how do you possibly start eating an elephant? one spoon at a time. same case here where we need to approach this from a prioritization framework. like, what can we get our arms around most easily? what's the most systemically important? what tools do we have? and so, one of the last things that i did in government in this kind of collaboration between the glowering natsec folks and the utopian climate folks, was identifying a list of linchpin technologies. right. like recognizing this is a huge undertaking. what are the technologies that are the most critical to the near term success of the transition and have the most sort of digital exposure that we should be ranking above the others and thinking about their systemic importance relative to one another? and to that end, if you're thinking about solar panels, they are relatively dumb machines. yes, they're the workhorse of the clean energy transition. and yes, they have some semiconductors in them and most of them are made in china, but they're pretty dumb. they aggregate up into inverters and substations. david roberts that's where the intelligence is. right? harry krejsa persistent inverter, indeed. yes. and so, i'm not too terribly worried in the immediate term about the risk from a solar panel. on the opposite end of that spectrum are your virtual power plant software and similar tools that are entirely software defined. they can move megawatts or even gigawatts of electricity around and concentrate a lot of that risk in a single, systemically important place. and so, that's one of the very first things we should probably prioritize. david roberts what would that translate to? prioritizing smart inverters? that just means getting some minimal security standards in place, and that would affect the inverter manufacturing industry. like, what does it mean to prioritize inverters? harry krejsa it means figuring out, like, what are the sources of risk here? what does the software, like   who makes inverters? what does the software and hardware supply chain for inverters look like? do adequate existing standards cover the software supply chain for inverters? if not, how do we make sure that we update standards to that end? the tricky part there is that the clean energy transition is happening faster than most of the standards making process. david roberts yes, i mean, i run into this problem a lot   harry krejsa indeed. david roberts on volts, which is like the tech is racing out ahead. people are doing this already. and the standards making bodies comparatively are like ents in lord of the rings, just sort of lumbering along slowly behind. harry krejsa that's right. the thing we learned at the white house. any honest, you know, alumni of a white house policy council will tell you that the formal powers that the white house has, legally, are actually pretty narrow. it is mainly through other agencies and stuff like that that you work. but one of the things that we can do very well is host parties and hosting parties where you bring together this very diffuse ecosystem and say, "look, i, mr. government, don't know what the right standard looks like for the cybersecurity of a smart inverter, but everyone here has a piece of what that answer is. so, let's put our cards on the table and figure it out." then, everyone goes home and has learned a lot more that day about how to think about this. even if it takes another, you know, 18 months for a formal standard to roll out, you have done a lot of the work. this is the reality for lots of standards; often by the time it is published, most of the industry has already coalesced around what it looks like. david roberts that's interesting. in this distinction between kind of dumb physical technology like a solar panel and a smart digital technology like an inverter that you need to worry about, i'm sort of curious where evs come on that scale because they kind of fit both. like, you can have a car that's not digital at all. like, we've had them for many years. but on the other hand, like evs are like rolling smartphones. and it seems to me   like i don't want to give china any ideas or whatever   but like in terms of threat vectors, ev chargers and evs are like, you know, you stick a bug in an ev and then it carries it to a new charger. they're like deliberately bug spreading devices. so, how do you think about evs in the context of this security? harry krejsa so, the good news and bad news. the bad news is your intuition is exactly correct. but the good news is that the technologies that make that so in an ev are also found in lots of other parts of our electricity ecosystem. and so, if we are able to make progress on vendor trustworthiness for battery development or the standards for safe bidirectional electricity flow as controlled by software, then we're making progress in all those directions. david roberts so, the ev interface with the grid is not unique. if you just solve that sort of interface problem, you're solving that problem too. or at least somewhat solving, getting at it. harry krejsa somewhat solving. you'd also get at it from the direction of like virtual power plants and how they interface with the grid, because virtual power plants are probably going to tap a lot of evs as they unfold. also, like, there's been a lot of news lately about chinese evs and byd kind of taking the world by storm. david roberts indeed. harry krejsa and that's the reason why the recent import controls and limitations on byd cars coming into the united states primarily focused on the software component of it. right. it was the fact that it is chinese made software on those cars that was one of the key distinctions. david roberts i mean, even if we put standards in place and say you can't sell an ev in america unless it meets these standards, you still have an enormous enforcement problem, don't you? right. because you're going to have millions upon millions of chinese evs coming in, any one of which could   you know, like, how do you enforce that? it's hard enough to enforce it on domestic manufacturers. how do you enforce that when it comes to imports? harry krejsa right. and while you also saw, a lot of folks in my part of this ecosystem noticed the israeli pager operation against hezbollah with great interest. david roberts creepy. didn't get the attention it deserved. super creepy. harry krejsa i completely agree. and it is a great demonstration of how easy it can be to hide nefarious intent in a supply chain network. right. and so, how do you get confidence in the provenance of these kinds of technologies and imports? david roberts these are some pretty long supply chains too. harry krejsa absolutely. david roberts a lot of nodes in that supply chain to worry about. harry krejsa absolutely. and there are different ways that you could approach this. one is the way apple does it where yes, your iphone is probably almost entirely made in china. we trust it with the most intimate parts of our lives, but we have trust there because apple is deeply vertically integrated. they have a great understanding of the hardware bill of materials and they have total control over every byte of software that is on that phone. david roberts i mean, in terms of like knowledge and control over supply chains, apple is sort of like an inn of one, is it not? you can't expect other companies to   harry krejsa precisely. and so, the way that you can get at it if you are merely one actor of many in this marketplace is things like the various national labs have done teardowns of ev charging equipment and evs themselves to kind of look for that kind of stuff. but that's difficult to scale, particularly if you want to do that before you order 100,000 widgets. and in fact, this is actually something i'm optimistic we can make some progress on in the short term. a lot of standard contracting language in both the public and private sectors for these kinds of imports have what are called anti reverse engineering provisions where you are not allowed to get a widget and tear it down and inspect it before ordering. and so, a lot of my former colleagues in government are working to put together new model acquisition and contracting language for government purchases where we can tear down the widget before we order 5 million pieces of it and do those kinds of inspections because it is the kind of close physical access to advanced technology where you could prod and poke and plug in and see how it reacts to different kinds of environments where you can get that kind of confidence. and so, this is one of those things where tweaking some contracting language could make a big difference. david roberts interesting. and here's a somewhat cynical question which came up online and which i think is very apt. we get sort of naturally outraged when we talk about privacy violations done by china. ooh, scary china. but of course, in the average american's life, the people who are invasively taking their data and using it for nefarious purposes are entirely domestic. you know what i mean? like these are, this is what the big tech companies want to do. and part of me sort of thinks that putting standards in place that would truly protect consumers against, you know, ill willed foreign hackers would also preclude domestic actors from doing a lot of the data mining and shady crap that they want to do. and so, there might be some pushback from domestic actors against safety standards and privacy standards with real teeth. am i off base in thinking that? harry krejsa i think that is true in some particular circumstances, like around right to repair laws and being able to get in and fiddle with things. but i think in most spaces, and particularly those around which i'm trying to bring together, the tree huggers and the dragon slayers, meta is not trying to collect ads on you in a way that would blow up your car. david roberts well, not yet. i mean. harry krejsa right. david roberts it's the trajectory of these guys. i don't know. harry krejsa but these are, i think, two categories of concerns with chinese activities of collecting information on you and pre positioning access in places and in ways that could only be used in a way to harm civilian americans. david roberts right, but can you really in practice cleanly distinguish between those and leave meta all its data mining capabilities while blocking all of china's ability to do something nefarious? like can you really make that distinction in practice? harry krejsa i think that in most cases, when we're talking about public safety, yes, we can. i think when it gets fuzzier into how the information that china is collecting on americans so that they can socially engineer them, so that they can phish them more effectively. david roberts "propagandize them on tiktok," apparently, is the big problem. harry krejsa indeed, yes, that's where things can get fuzzier. but when it comes to the safe functioning of our infrastructure and the delivery of essential services, you can separate the two pretty cleanly. david roberts i don't know. i would just put on record that, like a lot of shady security stuff, you know, sort of approaching it through the lens of china fear, i feel like it distorts it a little bit since we are constantly subject to privacy and security violations all the time by actors who are multinational at best and have only a light allegiance to domestic policy and domestic actors. so, but anyway, one other thing i wanted to hit on with you before we run out of time, which i was just delighted to find. so, you finish your report with these sort of recommendations for, you know, "lines of effort," you call them, going forward, most of which are around trying to sort of get the security people and the clean energy people to talk to one another and work together. but one of the things you say here, which i agree with entirely and have not yet encountered in the actual buttoned up, suit wearing halls of d.c. and think tanks, is this. i'm going to read the quote from the report. "the possibility of electricity generation so clean, cheap, and abundant as to test the bounds of energy scarcity is increasingly linked to the concept of artificial superintelligence and arguably possesses a scientifically clearer pathway to near term deployment. the us government should invest a similar urgency in understanding the potential of this abundance agenda as it is in artificial intelligence and in assessing whether or not it should be racing to realize it before beijing." so, just to restate that, you're saying the prospect of energy that is clean and super abundant, the end of energy scarcity, which has characterized our species' development from the very beginning, right? it's been an absolute feature of life on earth up until the present. the end of energy scarcity is a real possibility here. and as you say, arguably there's a clearer path from here to energy abundance than there is from here to ai superintelligence. and yet, ai gets all this hype, all these billions of dollars, all this like carpet bombing ai on everything now. whereas the prospect of energy abundance, which to me is like massively more promising for the welfare of humanity, is also sort of within sight. and yet, you never hear anybody talk about it. we don't   there's no formal government recognition of it. we talk about competing with china, but we never discuss it in that vein. so, a) thank you for just like bringing this possibility into this world, but like, b) talk about that a little bit more. how do you see that fitting into this larger security framework? harry krejsa yeah, absolutely. and indeed, i feel like i'm taking crazy pills. like, this is a clear   david roberts me too, man. harry krejsa it is a clear potential that is absolutely, like a little speculative, but not that speculative. right? david roberts less speculative every day. harry krejsa absolutely. and i think that part of the issue is among my colleagues, that prospect of the potential end of energy scarcity and resource abundance is talked about today in a way that i recall people talking about ai in policy spaces, like, five years ago, where it was like, "this seems like it could be a big deal. i don't want to sound like a crackpot." but, like, the tech is really   david roberts rendering crackpots of all of us, right? harry krejsa indeed, right. so, i indeed wanted to intentionally make sure this was included there because, you know, as you described, my title being a little overheated at the top, i am intentionally doing that to try and make sure that some of these arguments kind of extend out of our circles of climate and clean energy tracking wonks. right. these are ideas and arguments that are useful in different circles in different ways. and the abundance piece of it is, i think, under discussed in our climate and clean energy circle, but way under discussed outside of that. david roberts i mean, i can't imagine anything that would have a more profound effect on national security than energy abundance and global geopolitics. it's like everything these security people think about all day is just going to be profoundly affected by energy abundance if it happens. and yet, as you say, i never see it come up. is it just fear of, like, fear of looking like a crackpot? like, is that still just, like, what's holding people back? harry krejsa i think that's part of it. i also think that, you know, brian thompson or ezra klein might have tweeted something like this. so, i don't want to steal their valor here, but i think there was a line about how we have had a sort of scarcity mindset in our economic policy debate for a while now. our arguments around energy usage have been focused on efficiency because of pollution concerns. the troubles that we've had with wealth distribution and the unequal gains of internationalism, trade, and automation over the last couple of decades have, i think, given americans an intuition of scarcity, like a zero sum world. david roberts yes, and i'll just say, because you probably won't, but i will like every bit of conservative or reactionary politics anywhere you find it: if you pull the string, you find scarcity at the root of it. like scarcity and fear of not getting enough. right. the sort of zero sum mindset, "there's only a set amount, there's more of us than there is of it. all of life is a competition for that resource." like that is the root of conservative politics. which is why i've always wanted the democrats to adopt the slogan, "we can have nice things." harry krejsa yes, and i think the good news there is, i feel like we're starting to   the ship, the aircraft carrier of public discourse, i think is starting to move in that direction. and it would have indeed profound impacts on climate, on human flourishing. but also, if you need a hawkish argument, you know, to push forward this agenda, it also would have profound import for our national security. david roberts i mean, among other things, if every nation had a domestic supply of energy sufficient for its needs, just the motivation for a lot of fuckery would disappear. you know what i mean? like, the reason people go out and do corporate espionage and all that stuff, a lot of reasons for doing that would vanish. like, why bother? harry krejsa absolutely. and it's part of why i am actually optimistic about the sprint to artificial intelligence having positive spillover effects there. because i think that it will bring with it a lot of demand for more energy infrastructure. right. like ben thompson of stratechery likes to make the analogy to the 90s era build out of fiber optic cables around the country where there was a big over construction of fiber optics that ended up not making a ton of economic sense when the fervor over web 1.0 kind of died down. but if we're in a situation where the initial kind of sprint towards ai in this near term ends up resulting in a ton of energy parks of giant solar and storage or smrs   david roberts it's forcing the issue on all sorts of things that clean energy people have been after for a long time. harry krejsa absolutely. and i think with the cloak of national security import atop of it, it will be a great supporting argument, especially over these next few years. and i think in our entire conversation here today, with all this enthusiasm around clean energy's potential, i'd point out we've probably used the word carbon fewer times than maybe any other guest on volts. david roberts right. so, the idea here is sort of the overarching idea you're getting at with this paper and your whole sort of like this whole push is just clean energy and security people have common interests and need to work together. and furthermore, deploying clean digital technologies on the grid can improve us national security. so, you should, no matter how deep your glower, how deep your cynicism, and how deep your contempt for hippies: if you want a more secure grid, you should want more clean digital technology on it. that's sort of the take home. harry krejsa that's correct. and no matter how skeptical you are of the motivation behind american foreign policy, or whether we have a military industrial complex at the core making decisions or not, there are security imperatives for clean energy that you can use in conversation with people who are more concerned about those security imperatives and persuasively make that case. david roberts well, let's conclude with that then. just say a little word like, obviously, decarbonization, as you say, is going to take a bit of a backseat in the coming years. and that doesn't just look like the us either, like not to doom scroll a little bit, but it looks like momentum is flagging all over. do you think there is   you know, like if i'm a grizzled, glowering republican security hand of decades and the hippies come to me and they say, "oh well, guess what? we discovered we're actually secure too. we're actually helping you be more secure too." obviously, my eyebrow is cocked, right? obviously, i'm skeptical. do you think that this style of argument, this argumentative sort of space you've opened up here, has enough purchase to get some bipartisan consensus in the coming years? like, are there enough people on both sides of this divide that get it, that you can see an actual germ of cooperation starting in coming years? harry krejsa i think that it would be an important part of the equation, a part of the recipe that helps make it so. you know, very unfortunately, energy has become, you know, another battlefield of culture wars. right. and cleantech has been coded as liberal and people negatively polarize against it. and anything we can do to attenuate that reality, i think is going to be very important and helpful. and the incoming secretary of energy, mr. wright, he was an investor in advanced geothermal. there are ways to come at this in a different direction, to talk about some different ways. david roberts yeah, it does seem like he's reachable with reason. i don't know if you've had any direct dealings with him, but it seems like he is the kind of person who might bite on this argument. harry krejsa indeed. and i think that doug burgum could be, too. with mr. burgum postured to chair this new policy council in the white house, he had a similar kind of investment in energy dominance. precisely. and the intersection here that i am also cautiously optimistic about is the role of big tech or hyperscalers. david roberts yeah, that's really the x factor in a lot of things going on right now. harry krejsa indeed, yes. and, you know, big tech occupies this rare point in our economy of folks who understand energy economics, understand technical risk, and how much xi jinping is trying to hack into their systems all day, every day, and are filled with a workforce who wants to be able to say that their work is powering clean energy and making the world a better place. david roberts and crucially, they have giant sacks of money. harry krejsa correct. david roberts they're too big to code liberal. they're too big to   i've got to come up with some sort of slogan there, but, like, they have too much money to be dismissed as hippies. harry krejsa "right, exactly. and the coding of liberal is attenuating pretty quickly, right?" david roberts and for good reason. harry krejsa yes, you know, sam altman, announcing the big build out at the white house, right, with donald trump. david roberts oh, my god, sam altman sort of trailing along after all the other tech guys, being like, "wait, wait up, guys. i like trump too. guys, wait up." it's just the most   all right, i won't go off on this. it's just the most pathetic thing in the entire universe. harry krejsa but, yeah, all the big ceos, you know, were at the inauguration. they're trying very hard to be nonpartisan and to code as less democratic. right. and so that is a valuable factor there where if it looks like the trump administration is embracing the sprint to artificial intelligence, it looks like they're embracing energy economics, energy dominance, or whatever we want to call it. there's a   to make a dune reference here   a golden path that unites these things that could push all of this forward. david roberts right. clean energy is our digital firewall against china, basically, like, this is the sales pitch. well, harry krejsa, it's been a delight and a pleasure. this is really interesting. this is something i think we'll have to return to in coming years, but i think it is a very helpful intervention to arm the dirty hippies in volts' listenership with this argument that clean energy is security, is cybersecurity, is conducive to cybersecurity. i think it is a good intervention and very well timed. so thank you for coming on. harry krejsa thank you for having me as the most granola crunching listener in the pentagon of your podcast. it was an honor to be here. david roberts ready for more?

numbers, facts and trends shaping your world read our research on: full topic list read our research on: | this is the 12th “future of the internet” canvassing pew research center and elon university’s imagining the internet center have conducted together to get expert views about important digital issues. in this case, the questions focused on the impact of the covid 19 pandemic of 2020 on the evolution of humans plus technology. this is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about where current trends may lead in the next few years represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. pew research center and elon’s imagining the internet center built a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, choosing to invite people from several sectors, including professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses, think tanks and in networks of interested academics and technology innovators. the predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between june 30 and july 27, 2020. in all, 915 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to at least one of the questions covered in this report. more on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the final section. when pandemics sweep through societies, they upend critical structures, such as health systems and medical treatments, economic life, socioeconomic class structures and race relations, fundamental institutional arrangements, communities and everyday family life. a new canvassing of experts in technology, communications and social change by pew research center and elon university’s imagining the internet center finds that many expect similar impacts to emerge from the covid 19 outbreak. asked to consider what life will be like in 2025 in the wake of the outbreak of the global pandemic and other crises in 2020, some 915 innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded. their broad and nearly universal view is that people’s relationship with technology will deepen as larger segments of the population come to rely more on digital connections for work, education, health care, daily commercial transactions and essential social interactions. a number describe this as a “tele everything” world. notable shares of these respondents foresee significant change that will: at the same time, a portion of these experts express hope that changes spawned by the pandemic will make things better for significant portions of the population because of changes that: these six themes were commonly expressed by these experts in their responses to a question that asked them to consider the changes that were set in motion in 2020 by the covid 19 outbreak and describe what the “new normal” might look like in 2025. some 47% of these respondents said life will be mostly worse for most people in 2025 than it was before the pandemic, while 39% said life will be mostly better for most people in 2025 than it was pre pandemic. another 14% said most people’s lives in 2025 will not be much different from the way things would have turned out if there had been no pandemic. among the 86% who said the pandemic will bring about some kind of change, most said they expect that the evolution of digital life will continue to feature both positives and negatives. these expert views link in interesting ways with public attitudes. a pew research survey in august 2020 found that 51% of u.s. adults said they expected their lives to remain changed in major ways even after the pandemic is over. this is a nonscientific canvassing, based on a nonrandom sample. the results represent only the opinions of the individuals who responded to the queries and are not projectable to any other population. the bulk of this report covers these experts’ written answers explaining their responses. they sounded many broad themes about the ways in which individuals and groups are adjusting in the face of the global crisis, describing the most likely opportunities and challenges emerging as humans accelerate their uses and applications of digital technologies in response. it is important to note that the responses were gathered in the summer of 2020, before the completion of the presidential election in the united states and before covid 19 vaccines had been approved. as these experts pondered what was happening in mid 2020 and the likely changes ahead, they used words like “inflection point,” “punctuated equilibrium,” “unthinkable scale,” “exponential process,” “massive disruption” and “unprecedented challenge.” they wrote about changes that could reconfigure fundamental realities such as people’s physical “presence” with others and people’s conceptions of trust and truth. they wondered, too, if humans can cope effectively with such far reaching changes, given that they are required to function with “paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god like technology,” in the words of biologist e.o. wilson. among the scores of changes they see is the emergence of: an “internet of medical things” with sensors and devices that allow for new kinds of patient health monitoring; smart millimeter wave machines to diagnose people with disease symptoms; advances in synthetic biology and computational virology that improve drug testing and targeted disease therapies; diagnostic screenings that cover a person’s diet, genes and microbiome; handheld detection devices that citizen swarms use to address environmental problems; and a new class of tele care workers. additionally, these experts forecast the creation of 3 d social media systems that allow for richer human interaction (sometimes via hologram avatars); mediated digital agents (interdigital agents) gradually taking over significantly more repetitive or time consuming tasks; a “flying internet of things” as drones become more prolific in surveillance, exploration and delivery tasks; ubiquitous augmented reality; an expanded gig economy built around work from home free agents; urban farming that reaches industrial scale; advances in trusted cryptocurrency that enable greater numbers of peer to peer collaborations; locally based, on demand manufacturing; “local in spirit and local in practice” supply chains; a robust marketplace of education choices that allow students to create personalized schooling menus; “tele justice” advances that allow courts to handle large numbers of cases remotely; “truth valuation” protocols that diminish the appeal of disinformation; and small, safer nuclear reactors for energy production. at the more everyday level, these experts also think there will be better speech recognition, facial recognition (including sentiment discernment from facial expressions), real time language translation, captioning and autocorrect capacity, sensory suits, robust video search, body motion sensors, 3d glasses, multimedia databases and broader network bandwidth that will enable full 3d virtual experiences and developments in ai allowing it to serve more of people’s needs. these themes and more are outlined in the accompanying tables. the pandemic proves that world upending phenomena can emerge from anywhere. the turn to living and working more intensively within digital communications networks shows the value of these complex systems. the pandemic brings more focus on both the upsides and the downsides of digital life. people have the chance now to reconfigure major systems such as the structure of capitalism, education, health care and workplaces. advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence, smart cities, data analytics and virtual reality could make all systems safer, more humane and more helpfully productive. better communication of more accurate information can dramatically improve emergency responses in crises and alleviate suffering. source: nonscientific canvassing of select experts conducted june 30 july 27, 2020. n=915.“experts say the ‘new normal’ in 2025 will be far more tech driven, presenting more big challenges” following is a selection of some of the most comprehensive overarching responses shared by a number of the 915 thought leaders participating in this canvassing. privacy was always a luxury in the past   only the rich enjoyed it. then it spread to a large fraction of the population in the west. now it is receding again, in a way that mirrors the rise in inequality and the inevitable fall in civil liberties.marcel fafchamps, professor of economics and senior fellow at the center on democracy, development and the rule of law at stanford university marcel fafchamps, professor of economics and senior fellow at the center on democracy, development and the rule of law at stanford university, commented, “here are some of the changes i anticipate. please note that many of them were already in the background and could have occurred anyway, but i suspect less fast and less strongly. amy webb, quantitative futurist and founder of the future today institute, said: “we’ve entered a new bioinformation age, a new period in human history characterized by the shift from privacy and personal choice to new social, government and economic structures that require our data to operate. you can expect to see a flying internet of things: smart drones equipped with object  and face recognition, audio analytics, motion detection and sense and avoid systems that communicate with each other in the air and back down to a command center on the ground. the flying internet of things will be used for surveillance and deliveries of small payloads, such as medicines, medical supplies and other necessities. drones will transport specimens between buildings on hospital campuses, and they will move prescriptions between drugstores and homes. “the availability of diagnostic testing will be far more ubiquitous. drugstores, schools and large company offices will have compact covid 19 testing machines and technicians. a specimen will be taken, put onto a cartridge and results will be delivered within minutes. meanwhile, at airports, offices and event spaces, smart millimeter wave machines will be used to algorithmically diagnose people with covid 19 symptoms. the machines will include a thermal imager and a powerful suite of ai algorithms that in seconds will scan someone’s heart rate, respiration rate, blood oxygen level and body temperature. our new normal will include decentralized, persistent biometric surveillance. within just a few years, biometric recognition technology will transition from suspect, to reviled, to acceptable, to essential. eventually, a massive biometric surveillance apparatus will become the invisible infrastructure enabling our economies to function again. … “the fate of regulation, as national governments try to reconcile the desire for public safety with a reality in which algorithms are encoded with bias, could take many years to sort out, and the result is likely a patchwork of different protocols and permissions around the world. in the bioinformation age, transparency, accountability and data governance are paramount, but few organizations are ready. everyone alive today is under persistent surveillance from a host of technologies, and what most people don’t realize is that tech companies don’t need cameras to see you. from wi fi signals to single strands of hair, it is possible to recognize you without submitting to face scans. “catastrophe can be a catalyst for positive change. in a race to find a vaccine, important areas of science   synthetic biology, computational virology   are accelerating. this will result in more efficient drug testing, new approaches to targeted therapies and, someday, a future in which we engineer life itself. in a race to find a vaccine, important areas of science   synthetic biology, computational virology   are accelerating. “many organizations in the public and private sectors had not invested in digital transformation. the virus provided an immediate impetus to change. on the other side of this, organizations should have better workflows, data management, information and cybersecurity, and new efficiencies. the virus could finally be an accelerant to healthcare equity in the u.s. the virus has highlighted the lack of broadband infrastructure in the u.s. and a growing digital divide. one of the coronavirus aftershocks will be a realization that american kids need internet access to perform well in school, and many families don’t have it. we could categorize internet access the way we categorize food security and emerge from the pandemic with federal programs to provide internet and device assistance to families in need.” david brin, physicist, futures thinker and author of “earth” and “existence,” commented, “assuming we restore the basic stability of the western enlightenment experiment, and that is a big assumption, then several technological and social trends may come to fruition in the next five to 10 years. “of course, much will also depend upon short term resolution of current crises. if our systems remain undermined and sabotaged by incited civil strife and distrust of expertise, then all bets are off. you will get many answers to this canvassing fretting about the spread of ‘surveillance technologies that will empower big brother.’ these fears are well grounded, but utterly myopic. first, ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition are only the beginning. nothing will stop them and any such thought of ‘protecting’ citizens from being seen by elites is stunningly absurd, as the cameras get smaller, better, faster, cheaper, more mobile and vastly more numerous every month. moore’s law to the nth degree. yes, despotisms will benefit from this trend. and hence, the only thing that matters is to prevent despotism altogether. “in contrast, a free society will be able to apply the very same burgeoning technologies toward accountability. we are seeing them applied to end centuries of abuse by ‘bad apple’ police who are thugs, while empowering the truly professional cops to do their jobs better. i do not guarantee light will be used this way, despite today’s spectacular example. it is an open question whether we citizens will have the gumption to apply ‘sousveillance’ upward at all elites. but gandhi and martin luther king jr. likewise were saved by crude technologies of light in their days. and history shows that assertive vision by and for the citizenry is the only method that has ever increased freedom and   yes   some degree of privacy. handheld devices will start to carry detection technologies that can appraise across the spectrum, allowing ngos and even private parties to detect and report environmental problems. “i would wager that i am almost alone in saying this in this canvassing. the hand wringers are totally right about the problem and the danger presented by surveillance tech! and they are diametrically wrong in the common prescription. trying to ban technologies and create shadows for citizens to hide within is spectacularly wrongheaded and disastrous. see my book, ‘the transparent society: will technology make us choose between privacy and freedom?’” barry chudakov, founder and principal of sertain research, commented, “the ‘new normal’ for the average person in 2025 will entail adapting to multiple simultaneous accelerations. … covid 19 will be followed by other pandemics. atmospheric climate change will accelerate. wetlands deterioration will accelerate. the number of homeless refugees   due to soil, crop and weather devastation   will accelerate. information speeds and content compression will accelerate. the invasiveness and accuracy of tracking, search and recognition technologies will accelerate. our reliance on remote distance technologies and interfaces will accelerate. “this is a fundamental amplification. the way people use and think about technology will progress further on the continuum of actual to virtual. we will become even more screen dependent. we will see less of the world irl (in real life) and more through interfaces and screens whose distancing will shield us from deadly viruses but also isolate us. thus, the new normal with regard to the role of digital technologies in individuals’ personal and professional lives will be to usher in, and learn to navigate, the emerging metaverse. … what worries me most about the role of technology and technology companies in individuals’ lives in 2025 is the deliberate depreciation of complexity. the diminishment of complexity invites tyranny. it is the tyranny of simple ism and reductionism papered over by happy talk, lies and distortions designed to distract us from real issues. “we urgently need clarity and sound thinking. simplistic clichés and slight of hand responses won’t solve the complex problems we face such as accelerating climate change, soil and shoreline erosion, global immigration or morphing pandemics. we must embrace transparency   make the science required to tackle this complexity easily understandable. to be clear: complexity is not an end in itself; it is a fact of life that must be addressed, like the melting of the greenland ice sheet. for example, rana el kaliouby, ceo of affectiva, has written and spoken often about the need to embrace the complexity of gender, race, cultural context, accessibility, socioeconomic status and other variables that often are lacking in the environments that design the computer programs and algorithms that mediate our lives. we must humanize ai and make human variability the substrate of bits and qubits. “a second level of complexity   and the more urgent one   is our engagement with our devices. we use them; we typically are not present with them. we don’t notice how they bend our perceptions and behaviors. as complexity accelerates, curiously, our ability to embrace and engage with that complexity diminishes. this is in no small measure due to the ergonomic design of our devices that makes them both indispensable and makes us more likely to adhere in our thinking and action to their compression logic: they compress time, distance, communication, relationships. we have an active and reactive relationship with our tools. because of this we need a meta layer of awareness that monitors how we change and adapt. merely adopting tool logic as our own   texting while we drive, ghosting, growing alone together   is hardly a healthy response. further, our lack of presence with our tools effectively means we are at the mercy of the surveillance capitalism and interruptive logic that pervades their inception. these technologies and the companies that create them daily gain in sophistication; this is a new acceleration. “much of this accelerated sophistication is outstanding and useful. but we pick up and use our devices and, as it were, live our lives eyes wide shut. we don’t look at what we’re using and how we’re using it   we practice unconscious tech engagement. our tools are so ergonomic, so easy to use, so quick to respond that we are seduced by the slick way they reorganize our thinking, our behavior and our lives. but we have reached a tipping point with our tools: they are now more sophisticated than our ability to fully appreciate their effects; those effects are hidden in the tool logic, the actions of the tool. we must become present with our tools; we must gain in meta awareness, retool our understanding of how we think while tech immersed versus how we think otherwise. we have reached a tipping point with our tools: they are now more sophisticated than our ability to fully appreciate their effects; those effects are hidden in the tool logic, the actions of the tool. “why is this a concern? in prior human history, the power to manipulate reality, facts, behaviors and lives was centered in visible entities with physical representatives: the king, the pope, the organizer, the leader. institutions from churches to schools to governments were concrete entities with no metalife. if you couldn’t talk to the king or the pope every day, you knew where they lived in a castle or the vatican. while many institutions can fossilize and grow weedy with bureaucratic complexity, newer technologies present the ability to avoid presence. more than absence, this is the ability to hide, to obfuscate, to distort. the more virtual we become, the more i worry that we abandon the concrete for becoming gadgeteers and, as neil postman put it, ‘amusing ourselves to death.’ the more we disembody, the more virtual our realities become, the more we exhibit antisocial, even psychopathic behaviors. alone together we lose empathy; we lose compassion; we lose focus. as computing goes quantum, as algorithms and ai mediate more of our interactions, our educational structures have either lagged far behind or have given up altogether trying to prepare young minds for the world they will inherit. the more device dependent we become, the more incumbent it is upon all users to fully understand the tool logic and business model of the tool they pick up and use. surveillance is a business model; exploitation of data exhaust is a business model; tracking is a business model; observation and analysis is a business model. in whose interest is it for us to embrace that business model? in ‘everybody lies’ seth stephens davidowitz says, ‘google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.’ in other words, the human psyche is an emerging business model.” brad templeton, internet pioneer, futurist and activist, a former president of the electronic frontier foundation, said, “it has been suggested that this is the first battle in our last war on disease   that, partly as a result of this, we will come to understand viruses at a fundamental level. and now the budget will be there (due to the obvious benefit) to create the ability to make a vaccine or counter agent to a virus on demand   just sequence the virus and quickly be able to generate agents that will be known to be safe and effective. it’s very likely we’ll get much better at diagnostics as well. these are tremendous goods, and one would even say worth the cost of the pandemic, except we were trying to make them before and this just kickstarts them. this could prevent the death of millions, and if you can attribute it to the pandemic, you would have to go into the ‘wildly, wildly positive’ camp on the pandemic. “we’re learning a great deal about videoconferences and meetings, holding large events online, holding parties online. we still suck at it, but we’re learning lots and getting better. the video call was something that was going to be ‘the next thing’ since the 1950s. the pandemic made that finally happen, and it’s probably here to stay. we may even develop means to do pretty significant business travel without the travel, which has benefits in cost, time and pollution. … “we may learn to do occasional ‘dry runs’ of all the technologies necessary for hard lockdown   online shopping, delivery, virtual meeting spaces and remote learning and more. we will probably learn that the right approach is to use those technologies to generate a very hard lockdown for a short time, rather than a moderate lockdown for a very long time. delivery robots (in which i am involved) will gain more appreciation. public transit will mostly recover but only because it has to; long overdue changes away from its 20th century models will be hastened in reaction to that decline, and fear for several years of cramped, packed spaces. this will slightly hasten the eventual replacement of most public transit with robotic group and solo transportation. the world will probably get a bit cleaner. ultraviolet disinfection will become common. this may reduce the spread of other infections like flu.” digital technologies always mirror and magnify the good, bad and ugly. danah boyd, founder and president of the data & society research institute and principal researcher at microsoft, wrote, “inequality will create a huge division between those who are thriving and those who are in dire straits. there will be plenty of high status people who will come out of the pandemic with wealth, health and their life goals intact. but a large amount of society will be dealing with all sorts of ripple effects. there will be those who got sick and never fully recovered. there will be those who lost their jobs and precarity turned to poverty fast. but there will also be mothers whose careers took a left turn after multiple years of trying to be a stay at home parent plus a teacher while working at home. there will be so many people who will be facing tremendous post traumatic stress disorder as they struggle to make sense of the domestic violence they experienced during the pandemic, the loss of family and friends and the tremendous amount of uncertainty that surrounded every decision. digital technologies always mirror and magnify the good, bad and ugly. people will continue to use technology to get support and help, but they will also struggle with how technology becomes a place of hostility and information confusion. a cohort of young people will be accustomed to engaging friends through technology, but also struggle with a range of face to face encounters as the fears/confusion over illness persist. if we’re lucky, schools, conferences, mental health and general health care will be forever reimagined to consider hybrid ways of approaching services. but this is more likely to be something that magnifies inequality rather than actually doing the connective work that could be possible. the biggest unknown in the united states concerns political leadership.” douglas rushkoff, media theorist and author, wrote, “2025 may be a whole lot more local in spirit and local in practice. as global supply chains falter and reveal their structural inadequacies, people will come to depend more on locally produced goods. this will also mean fewer ridiculous, meaningless, valueless cubicle jobs, and more time spent actually creating value. i’m thinking simple, real tasks like growing food, building houses, teaching kids, health care and providing energy may dominate what we now think of as ‘work.’ in other words, instead of developing careers in industries, people will learn how to do things   which could prove truly fulfilling and psychologically stabilizing. “the climate and economic challenges may be bigger, but our resilience as people could be stronger. it’s only three or four years out, so i don’t anticipate we’ll be through the disillusionment at the failure of global corporate capitalism. as for the role of digital technologies? i don’t know if they will be quite as important in their own right. they’ll likely be more embedded into other stuff, and less fetishized on their own. the only tech related change i’m really hoping for is less of it. it’s really draining. even typing this right now i’m using tech to write to you about the future of tech? as for tech making life better? the obvious ones: solar, regenerative energy, less industrial agriculture (more low  or light tech solutions to topsoil depletion, air pollution, watershed destruction). more simple stuff that solves real problems. less social networks designed to create new problems. “my worries? well, there are now trillions of dollars invested in companies that depend on addiction, isolation and fear to keep growing. that’s very dangerous, since these companies will spend their war chests on deliberately causing panic, pain and fear. they know the more upset and reactive we are, the more likely we are to engage with their platforms. so, when the wealthiest industry in the world is doing everything it can to attack our basic sense of well being, i do get concerned we may not have the resilience as people to oppose these forces. once they really get a handle on using ai for this purpose, i’m not sure how we get ourselves out of it. even now, we see people on social media platforms attacking those with whom they should be allied. they cancel people rather than collaborate with them. if ais determine that turning people against each other is the easiest way for them to deliver desired metrics, then we could be in great trouble.” esther dyson, internet pioneer, journalist, entrepreneur and executive founder of wellville, responded, “things will be both better and worse. many people will be dead and many others more will be permanently damaged, physically or mentally or economically. and those people will mostly be the ones who were worse off in the first place, poor, black or another minority, disabled or ill, or otherwise challenged. yet at the same time, the u.s. and even the world at large are much more aware of the disparities and the unfairness of this situation. “with luck, we will start to think long term (to the next pandemic?) and realize how much better things could be for all (including rich employers who want educated, happy, productive employees and well off customers) if we would invest in our greatest asset   human beings. the money one spends keeping pregnant/new mothers healthy, providing child care (and paying care workers’ wages that honor their work), educating children, keeping people healthy instead of trying to fix them when it’s too late   all that money delivers a huge return on investment. it’s just that the rewards don’t go directly to those who pay; they go to society as a whole and make the world a better place for both rich and poor (but with more impact on the poor because their condition has so much more room for improvement). “that’s the optimistic view of things. i’m doing everything in my power to make it come true. the short version is that we need to think long term and invest in everyone’s future versus grabbing what we can for our narrowly defined selves. ah yes, and you were asking about ‘digital tech.’ we’re going to discover that it is getting cheaper to do a lot of things, including many varieties of telemedicine, less travel and jet lag for the rich, upper class workers, and that we can actually afford to invest in human capital cost effectively. we need to do that and we need to train a large new cadre of tele care workers to help deal with the residual effects of covid 19 (including contact tracing). the human communication skills needed for contact tracing now are the same skills that will also make for better child care, mental health and other care workers. we need to do that and we need to train a large new cadre of tele care workers to help deal with the residual effects of covid 19 (including contact tracing). the human communication skills needed for contact tracing now are the same skills that will also make for better child care, mental health and other care workers. “one really interesting impact will be on privacy: any stranger could be infectious, so there will be demands for testing and immunity passports and the like   and a similar demand for secrecy from (usually poor) people terrified of losing their physical presence required jobs, their ability to travel, etc., etc. it’s akin to issues around concealed weapons, etc., etc. a lot will depend on how immunity/vaccines/and other medical issues play out over the next year. “there will be a lot less traveling and a lot more appreciation for face to face (or mask to mask) connections when we do make them. much more telehealth and a healthier population. more self aware use of social networks and an understanding of how addictive they can be. the use of all kinds of digital monitors should help people to manage their own health and resilience better (though they can be abused/addictive like everything else). i would love for every third grader in this country to get a continuous glucose monitor along with an age appropriate scientific curriculum so that they could see for themselves how the food they eat affects their bodies and their mood. or more cheaply, at least a mouse house with four mice   two sedentary and two with a running wheel, orthogonally two on a healthy diet and two eating the kind of processed, overly sweetened junk still found in many schools’ cafeterias. maybe peta would sue, which would just help to make the point of how badly we feed so many children. meanwhile, the kids could just watch and see the impact of the four combinations of choices. i worry that poor and minority people still will have limited access to all the tech and tools that the rich take for granted. … disparities in access to tech can aggravate other disparities. i also worry that people will turn to tech rather than to other people for human comfort.” jamais cascio, research fellow at the institute for the future, predicted, “three big arenas of technological uncertainty we’re likely to see by 2025 emerge from social dynamics well underway now: the prevalence and availability of remote work and the technologies used to enable it; the manifestation of authority and policing, particularly in the balance of surveillance of citizens and surveillance by citizens; and the degree of trust and accountability of social media systems, in terms of both personal privacy and protections against manipulation. all three of these issues could have radically divergent outcomes in a relatively short amount of time, making it very difficult to pin down 2025. “beyond information technology, we could see major improvements in our lives through the acceleration of the shift away from fossil fuels: more electric cars and the corresponding infrastructure, more power self sufficient homes and much longer lived energy storage/batteries. i also hope that the pandemic will trigger a variety of advances in medical and biotech systems, improving the overall quality of health and life for millions (or billions).” jim spohrer, director of cognitive open technologies and the ai developer ecosystem at ibm, noted, “the new normal by 2025 will likely be better. 1) dealing with pandemics will be improved, vaccine speed of development will be improved, preparedness for next pandemic will be improved. 2) online education, health and government services will be improved, and more people will have experience with them. 3) businesses will continue to encourage more online meetings (less travel) and more work from home (less travel). 4) there will be more retail robots, tele presence robots and robots at home   all with more investment, deployments and success stories. 5) there will be a resurgence in community approaches to local jobs in service of community culture and development.” fernando barrio, a lecturer in business law at queen mary university of london expert in ai and human rights, wrote, “more than 20 years ago we all had a very optimistic and naive view of the evolution of technology in people’s lives, so it was paramount to allow the technology to develop unhindered by regulatory intervention. the result is a vast and resilient network that allows us to do even more things than we envisioned. but it also means a world where wealth is more concentrated than ever, where science takes second place to charlatans and gossipers that cause serious damage to millions, where the political arena is hijacked by a combination of media and foreign interventions making a mockery of democracy, and the list of not very nice things is quite longer than the nice moments of the arab spring and #metoo movements. and it seems that, yet again, we are planting the seeds for the new normal to be very nice in the surface, while creating a society more unequal, unfair and sharply divided about too many things that need social consensus. in 2025 the new normal will imply a society more sharply divided between those who have access and those who don’t. in this context, access is multi pronged: access to food, access to wealth, access to connectivity and technology, access to power. and it seems that, yet again, we are planting the seeds for the new normal to be very nice in the surface, while creating a society more unequal, unfair and sharply divided about too many things that need social consensus. in 2025 the new normal will imply a society more sharply divided between those who have access and those who don’t. “when one thinks about people’s relationship with technology, one is thinking of the group of people that have access to it   unfettered access. if we restrict the view to that group, the new normal will be an enhanced form of what we are living today, where the economy, the education, the human relations and the politics are technologically mediated. before the covid 19 crisis, there was already a push by certain sectors of the media it corporations to normalize the use of certain technologies where the possibility of individuals’ control is purely theoretical. that push was supported in part by elite universities, academia, due to funding from those corporations or because the ideological shift had already taken place within them. “accordingly, it was possible to see all around the globe members of those groups advocating the change from text to voice, therefore encouraging voice managed assistants in every room of people’s homes, disregarding the immense possibilities of surveillance and absolute control over people’s lives that those technologies introduce. not focusing on the need to have better privacy agreements regardless of the countless examples of violations of agreements that discourage the use of the information for any purpose without individuals’ control and consent. “the covid 19 crisis showed that the resilience of the vast global network over which different layers of protocols, software and applications run is being used to exalt the upper applications layer because it is the one that made possible the tele everything that we are experiencing. thus, in the new normal hyper intrusive technology is taken for granted. instead of embedding privacy, security and protection of individual rights in every layer that runs over the network, in the crisis the new normal is that those concepts are modified to allow technologies to intrude in people’s lives (as they already do in certain nondemocratic countries). that paradigm shift will also blur the limits between people’s personal, professional and public lives. for example, instances of cyber sacking   in which one loses a job for comments or information posted online   will become more common, having an impact on the quality of the discussions and information put forward by individuals, and even private conversation held in private groups or within hearing of voice managed assistants at home might be also processed at that effect.” christine boese, a consultant and independent scholar, wrote, “thanks to the horrors of covid 19, as we sit in our homes and take stock of our personal economic situations, make hard decisions, suddenly what is absolutely essential becomes clear. it is a reset, and   despite the horrors   it was long, long overdue. … “it is in difficult times when we see the seams and frayed edges of our thin veneer of civilization, the illusions of the fractured u.s. health care system and even the severe limits to much touted electronic medical records innovations. in times like this, we don’t have to look so hard to separate technology hype from reality. we face failing infrastructure across the u.s. other countries have systems that work, at all levels, while ours falters. without this horrific stress test, we would not be able to see, let alone correct for, these fault lines. that thin veneer of civilization balances precariously on a consumption engine, and american culture is literally consuming itself, even as rush limbaugh suggests we need to adapt to this self consumption ‘like the donner party did.’ as with most absurdities, it comes with its own irony: like the roman empire, we make little ourselves and instead consume the cheaply produced, slavery inducing trifles created elsewhere, as if it fills some kind of deep emptiness inside. the extremis of the covid 19 situation glaringly exposes several things that had previously been invisible: craig silliman, an executive vice president for a major global company, wrote, “while covid 19 has forced us to distance physically, it has brought individuals closer together. many of us have spent years in countless meetings and meals and on airplanes with colleagues and yet never learned as much about them as we have in the past four months. when we lost our physical proximity, we created emotional bridges that connected us in new and profound ways. it turns out that it took forced distancing to bring out our most complete and authentic humanity. i believe that once we are together again physically, we will not forget what we learned while we were apart, and that will make for richer and deeper relationships for years to come. when we lost our physical proximity, we created emotional bridges that connected us in new and profound ways. it turns out that it took forced distancing to bring out our most complete and authentic humanity. “on the technology front, most of the technologies that we are using daily are not new. what has changed is not the capability but our behavior. i have talked to numerous colleagues who have observed that they never again will board a six hour flight for a two hour meeting. we previously might have thought that this was highly inefficient but didn’t feel we had ‘permission’ to suggest video conferencing because we weren’t sure how a boss/client/customer might react. because this was a simultaneous discontinuity in work patterns globally, it will have caused us all to change our work habits, particularly involving the use of technology to be more efficient. we will be working in very (positively) different ways in 2025 as a result of covid 19. we previously have thought about the office as a place where one must go to ‘be at work’ or to ‘do work,’ even if the office environment wasn’t the most effective location for a particular task. we will increasingly think about a spectrum of locations where work can be done, and a spectrum of technologies that are a platform for work to be done, and start by asking what the task is that we seek to accomplish and then using the appropriate location and technology to best accomplish that task. that will allow us to design office spaces to serve as platforms for what shared, collaborative spaces do best while liberating workers to find the mode and place of working that makes them most effective.” abigail de kosnik, associate professor and director of the center for new media at the university of california, berkeley, predicted, “climate change, invasive corporatized technologies and increasing economic precarity will all combine to give rise to a far more paranoid society in 2025 than we had at the start of 2020. in some ways, widespread fear and anxiety will have positive results, as people will be more environmentally conscious than ever before and will engage en masse in efforts to regulate corporate resource extraction and pollution, and will show a collective willingness to adopt less environmentally harmful lifestyles (for example, i expect a huge upsurge in mass transit use and a corresponding movement to improve the quality of mass transit in cities across the u.s.). however, the paranoia will be justified   there will be fewer opportunities for college graduates who do not have family connections, and climate change will make large regions uninhabitable. this will lead to huge problems in mental health and will negatively impact at least a couple of generations of americans in terms of their relationships, sense of self and lifetime  happiness quotient. “i am especially worried about the fact that technology companies are overall having a hugely negative effect on the environment and on humans’ ways of thinking about and understanding the world … and they don’t seem to care much about spreading misinformation and training hundreds of millions of people all over the world to think less critically about information are my biggest concerns. the tech industry will likely continue to produce technologies that either do nothing to improve everyday life or make it significantly worse. what can happen to improve technology is better organization on the part of users and tech workers who object to their companies’ negative social impact. “i have hope that we will see a wave of activism and unionization and the formation of alternate types of organizations (b corps or p corps for example) that will yield new technologies whose aim will not be profit but actual problem solving   mobilizing collective intelligence to solve the problems of environmental disaster, massive social inequity and lack of opportunity that we will face in 2025.” adam clayton powell iii, senior fellow at the usc annenberg center on communication leadership and policy, predicted, “the 2025 ‘new normal’ will be better, often much better, for the affluent and for other global elites. they have now and will continue to have access to and can afford the best technologies to serve them in their personal and professional lives. but 2020 has been such a setback for the hundreds of millions of people, most in asia and africa, who have just emerged from poverty and whose progress has now been reversed that it is difficult to imagine these reversals can be entirely cured by 2025. in the u.s. we had record employment   some said ‘full’ employment   as recently as february of this year. while one can hope that the sudden plunge to depression level unemployment can be temporary, there are so many changes   especially in any industry relying on people crowding together (transportation, entertainment)   that the shift to video communication and streaming home entertainment suggests these coping mechanisms for 2020 will not entirely recede. “many have said that the virus pandemic has accelerated changes in uses of digital technologies that were already underway. there does not seem to be any reason to believe we will return to 2019. for a start, why would i ever want to commute to an office again? for decades, we have said that the internet brings to our fingertips the riches of the world’s libraries. now people around the world   people who are connected, that is   realize they have the riches of the world’s information and entertainment video and experiential technologies at their fingertips. this will not go away. consider history: the metropolitan opera is streaming opera productions every day. it was during the depression that the met started transmitting its productions on radio. the depression ended but the met’s radio broadcasts didn’t.” susan etlinger, an industry analyst for altimeter group, observed, “technology is ultimately about power   about who frames a problem, what ‘solving’ it looks like, who benefits, who is overlooked. so, if anything would make post pandemic life better, it would be a willingness to, as john lewis has said, ‘get in good trouble.’ my main concern is that the large technology companies have far too much power to frame what we know and how we live, and that, ultimately, we are all assets to be leveraged for shareholder value. technology should be a tool   not a weapon, a religion or a government. the biggest issue for technology is essentially a choice: do we commit to building models that describe and classify people and the world without excluding, discriminating and amplifying inequality? my main concern is that the large technology companies have far too much power to frame what we know and how we live, and that, ultimately, we are all assets to be leveraged for shareholder value. technology should be a tool   not a weapon, a religion or a government. “in a year in which we mourn the deaths of george floyd, tony mcdade, breonna taylor and too many others and again confront our long history of systemic racism can we finally acknowledge that technology has been deeply complicit? more to the point, can we stop hiding behind the fig leaf that data and technology are a) neutral and b) always the answer? yes, people are messy, yes this is hard. but we need to stop hiding behind excuses. this isn’t to say we should toss our phones and flee to the hills. but we do have to ask the hard questions and make the harder choices about how we solve problems, and whether, in solving one set of problems, we’re creating others that are more insidious and longer lasting. “will we, in the interest of public health and safety, increasingly surveil our employees, guests, customers, neighbors? will we address the inevitable issues of discrimination and exclusion of vulnerable and marginalized populations? do these technology solutions actually work, and are there other, less invasive ways to keep people safe? did we leave anyone behind? i hope we can use this moment in our history as an opportunity to reflect on the choices we’ve made and what, finally, we value. if we say black lives matter, are we willing to speak up in meetings where design decisions have the potential to put black lives at risk? are we willing to challenge cultural norms to ensure that we have representation from the people who are most affected by the decisions we make and whose talent we have overlooked? are we willing to sit down so someone else can speak, and amplify their voices?” paul jones, professor emeritus of information science at the university of north carolina, chapel hill, predicted, “let’s look at changes that were underway and that will likely prevail by 2025: the use of ai to optimize the logistics of resource use could dramatically improve our nutrition, education, health and even our social interactions. the addition of sensor feedback into automation of all types, from traffic handling to regulatory regimes, could greatly improve the functionality of our systems. jeanne dietsch, new hampshire senator and former ceo of mobilerobots inc., said, “disruption is always difficult. until we task ai with the complex logistics needed to optimize the use of resources and the smart automation needed to perform low skilled jobs, many workers will be overtaxed: teachers, bus drivers, health professionals, mental health professionals, caregivers, administrators, just to name a few. we face a vast amount of work that has been ignored over the past decades full of short sighted decisions. we have failed to maintain our infrastructure, but more importantly, we have failed to care for the future of the next generation. to turn that work into jobs requires determination and the ability to stand up for our values, stand up against a system that rewards corporations seeking short term profit over any other goal. carbon fee and dividend is the first step toward shifting the structure of our economy toward a more egalitarian one, with better values. the use of ai to optimize the logistics of resource use could dramatically improve our nutrition, education, health and even our social interactions. the addition of sensor feedback into automation of all types, from traffic handling to regulatory regimes, could greatly improve the functionality of our systems. what concerns me most is technology’s ability to enable people to magnify ignorance and misinformation.” alexa raad, co founder and co host of the techsequences podcast and former chief operating officer at farsight security, commented, “the pandemic has already highlighted and exacerbated the gap between the haves and the have nots, not only in terms of the cost of lives lost but also in terms of economic disparity. the policies of the current administration have accelerated that divide. … the pandemic also put a spotlight on broken systems and processes such as health care that require a significant effort and will to fix. … “the pandemic highlighted the importance of internet connectivity. many companies in the tech and service industries will realize that a work at home model is efficient and less costly for some or many of their workforce and that they do not need expensive commercial urban real estate. therefore, more people will work from home, which affects everything from daily routines to the makeup of services offered to the home. however, this is a luxury for only a set of individuals who can work from home and can afford the set up (high speed access, required space and internet enabled equipment) to work from home. this of course sets a new and quite complex normal for managing cybersecurity threats. large scale industry events will be less prevalent, as will the frequency of corporate travel. all of these will have rippling affects across multiple industries like airlines, hospitality and event/exhibit management. overall, there will be less economic security. one of the legacies of the pandemic is the realization that although many conveniences of modern life are predicated on the simple assumption that close proximity of people yields economic and social benefits, in an age of accelerating climate change and multiple pandemics (covid 19 is likely a precursor of others yet to come) that will no longer hold true. conveniences such as airplane travel, movies, amphitheater, subways, high rise apartment units, shopping malls, were based on this assumption and as a result densely packed areas were sustained hotspots of infection. … technologies to identify and manage the spread of infections will be intrusive in terms of privacy (example   contact tracing apps) unless very thoughtful governance of data privacy is implemented. … “the new normal will put a greater strain on our health care system. the pandemic highlighted how unprepared we as a nation are, not only in terms of our acceptance of scientific and evidence based advice, but also in regard to having the means to efficiently and economically deal with a public health crisis. a beneficial tech related change will be the delivery of some aspects of health care into the home. for example, people will continue to have online consultations with health professionals instead of an inconvenient in person visit. this is already happening and will be the new normal. internet of things based devices will be more plentiful and will serve as a means to monitor everyday health and diagnose and in some cases remotely manage illnesses without the need for intrusive surgery. however, they will also pose a much greater threat in terms of privacy and cybersecurity. more and more private data will be generated, collected and used. “internet of things based devices will be more plentiful and will serve as a means to monitor everyday health and diagnose and in some cases remotely manage illnesses without the need for intrusive surgery. however, they will also pose a much greater threat in terms of privacy and cybersecurity. more and more private data will be generated, collected and used. unless there are appropriate safeguards and controls as to how the data is handled, we will see an erosion of our privacy and further loss of control over our choices and decisions as a result. internet of things devices have the potential to greatly improve our well being, and we will see ai enabled iot devices which will, for example, monitor our health, provide biological feedback, anticipate and warm of an impending health crisis, etc. but iot devices increase the attack surface and vectors for bad actors. we will see rise of new cybersecurity threats. imagine, for example, a nation state targeting a public figure by hacking into his/her pacemaker. given where we are now in terms of lacking a basic level of cyber hygiene for these devices, unless we make significant progress we will fall further and further behind the bad actors. “a few of my concerns: maja vujovic, a consultant for digital and ict at compass communications, predicted, “if entire sectors   education, tourism and hospitality, food production, entertainment and more   continue to experience the deep freeze caused by covid 19 through 2020 and beyond, the ‘new normal’ will likely not remain limited to benign disruptions, such as blended learning or continued work from home and the related office space redux. if the pandemic persists for many months or spills over into another year, the recession will go into free fall. countries with strong social security systems and/or capital will activate a range of protective measures to prevent public disorder. countries without such a safety net will be forced to choose between solidarity and oppression. “if the pandemic persists longer than a year, it will affect the world’s economy like a global war; in that case, food rationing and other wartime measures will become inevitable. this will entail identification, allocation, distribution and delivery   all of it enabled by a range of digital tech. identity control will therefore have to be enforced very strictly, to avoid fraud. other previously inconceivable disruptions will occur, e.g., primary and secondary education will need to enter into public private partnerships with commercial providers of automated instruction, learning and testing platforms at scale, able to instruct the majority of students, while teachers from formal schools deal with small numbers of exceptions, such as special needs students etc. a ‘marketplace’ will emerge, where students will be able to pick and choose courses from any university, to create unique, personalized schooling ‘menus.’ “higher education will become a terrain where a small number of entertainment savvy lecturers attract huge student audiences via tech enabled remote learning, while professors unskilled in it become dispensable. a ‘marketplace’ will emerge, where students will be able to pick and choose courses from any university, to create unique, personalized schooling ‘menus.’ this will create a demand for a certification mechanism at a level above individual universities. distinguished schools with vast traditions will thus have to reconsider and redefine their missions and their very purpose and a number of them may not prove sustainable. overwhelmed health systems will become the reserve of emergency and infection treatments. workplaces will become leaner and nimbler. specialized teams will work on project based assignments, often without the need for a large enterprise to sustain them. taxation and labour laws will need to change, to enable individuals to participate in a more secure, more equitable digitally enabled gig economy.” jon lebkowsky, ceo, founder and digital strategist at polycot associates, wrote, “my hopes: mary chayko, author of “superconnected,” said, “in the absence of a national commitment and strategy to assist marginalized populations in attaining online access, skills and literacy, social inequalities will persist and deepen in the ‘new normal.’ this will exacerbate all current societal problems: racial and gender discrimination, poverty, health crises and complications, educational and work related inequities, privacy and surveillance. digital technologies can be employed to help to improve these conditions, but unless their benefits can be realized by all, social justice and equality will remain elusive. digital technology, and the means to use and understand it, must be considered a primary social good. technologies that will assist people in living productive, healthy lives   like online learning, working and telemedicine tools   should be freely and widely available, along with necessary and relevant information and support. i am most worried that the scope of tech companies’ impact on our lives will become so deep, sophisticated and far reaching that we will fail to see and resist it or grow weary of doing so.” social media enabled us to connect with people anywhere in glancing ways; video conferencing in many forms   virtual conferences, happy hours and so on   will let us connect in more direct and meaningful ways. jeff jarvis, director of the tow knight center and professor of journalism innovation at city university of new york, commented, “yes, there may be unintended positive consequences, including greater awareness of racial inequities in society; less travel and thus less environmental damage; greater ability to work at home and remotely and be closer to family. but we cannot gloss over the still unknown health repercussions that millions of needlessly infected people will have to deal with; the severe economic impact on so many sectors of a service economy permanently affecting the employment of people in lower paid jobs; the likely permanent economic damage to universities and colleges as institutions; the lost educational time for children during the pandemic; and mental stress on everyone. as much we may now suffer zoom fatigue, i believe that in the long run, having become accustomed to seeing people in online calls, we will find they provide richer interaction. at work we will still be addicted to having too many damned meetings but if we can waste less time traveling or commuting to them, all the better. social media enabled us to connect with people anywhere in glancing ways; video conferencing in many forms   virtual conferences, happy hours and so on   will let us connect in more direct and meaningful ways. i would like to think that we would see the value in gathering and sharing health data at a level that would allow us to spot and treat problems early in their spread in the future, but i fear a growing moral panic around data may prevent that.” jillian york, director of international freedom of expression for the electronic frontier foundation, wrote, “i expect that, when it comes to technology, our ‘new normal’ will be an even greater dependency on privately owned infrastructure and platforms, making us more beholden to silicon valley than before. i worry that the amount of time that we’re now spending at home has led us to this greater reliance on it, and that companies are not adapting along with us. when it comes to platforms, specifically, one of my biggest concerns is the impact they have on our speech and our well being or dignity. on the one hand, hate speech is rampant and companies are responding piecemeal. on the other hand, at a time when many of us need platforms for our livelihoods, companies are cracking down prudishly on nudity, sexuality and the human body. the impact that this has on sex workers, burlesque performers and others whose work touches on these themes must not be ignored; by banning content around these topics without their consultation, we’ve essentially created an untouchable class of workers. “i worry about the unaccountability of silicon valley and the ways in which corporate policymakers practice ‘both sidesism’ in order to craft policies that benefit the lowest common denominator without upsetting too many others. i worry about the fact that so many people are willing to hand over the governance of their speech to unaccountable actors. i worry about the potential for technology companies to keep our own history from us   already we’ve seen images from u.s. protests taken down (often for violating rules on ‘graphic violence’   even when it’s the feds committing the violence   or in some cases, bans on nudity), echoing what syrians have been pointing out for years about the erasure of videos, many of which contain documentation of war crimes, emerging from their country. i worry about the continued capture of data for no purpose other than to sell us more stuff we don’t need.” morgan g. ames, associate director of the university of california, berkeley’s center for science, technology & society, responded, “while i am heartened by the #blacklivesmatter protest movement in the united states as well as protest movements in hong kong and elsewhere around the world, i look to previous disasters and broader trends as a probable guide to what will be coming. and what i see are too many opportunities for the powerful to retrench and expand their power. ubiquitous surveillance, increasingly fascist policing tactics, the expansion of hate groups that amplify the worst state ideologies, and the widening chasm between the ultra rich and everyone else are all global structural trends that will be incredibly difficult, and incredibly disruptive, to reverse. as much as i would like to hold out hope that the disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus can be turned toward social justice, the evidence so far that this is the case is really not good.” vint cerf, internet hall of fame member and vice president at google, observed, “we may see more flexibility in work from home provisions. travel may be less necessary thanks to video conferencing. i have maintained significant international interactions despite time zone challenges for the past three months. i further expect: christina j. colclough, an expert on the future of work and the politics of technology and ethics in ai, observed, “unless our governments step into another gear, we will: “i would like the following to be regulated: “among my worries are these: the failures of social media and ai are not technology problems. they are problems of human design and execution. alan d. mutter, a consultant and former silicon valley ceo, wrote, “we are not going to code our way out of the moral and political mess we are in. technology will help if the right people do the right things. it will do epic damage if they don’t. the social media were hijacked by thugs and trolls to do incalculable damage. their efforts were at once ignored and abetted by facebook ceo mark zuckerberg and his ilk to amp up page views to boost ad revenues. social media had great promise to level the intellectual playing field by giving everyone the power to give or get whatever information they wanted. instead, the social media have become treacherous cesspools of mis  and mal information. artificial intelligence can do wondrous things so long as it is properly trained and deployed. that is its notable fail. for instance, ai often fails to accurately recognize the faces of people of color. when ai is used to recommend sentences for criminals, it tends to discriminate against people of color. the failures of social media and ai are not technology problems. they are problems of human design and execution. technology is only as good as the people who devise and control it. i am less interested in potential technology advances; i am worried about whether new developments will be wisely and safely deployed.” kathleen m. carley, director of the center for computational analysis of social and organizational systems at carnegie mellon university, commented, “more people will be able to work remotely, allowing companies access to greater pools of talent, and a possible leveling of pay across cities. there will be an increased understanding of viruses and how to create vaccines and improved technology to support health care. there will be regulation of and self imposed constraints on social media platforms. “there will also be: increased public understanding of the limits of, and problems with, machine learning; police hiring reform; an international response to disinformation; improved technologies for group meetings online; new agile business models for technologies that mainly employ the web; improved health standards in schools and public places; improved sick leave policies; a decrease in business travel, possibly leading to a better carbon footprint; less middle management. there will be a small increase in automation, but more effort on designing and building even more automation for the home and small businesses that will become more ubiquitous and some type of certification for ai to show that it meets some ethical standards. there will be certification for online tools to show that they meet some privacy standard. “other things   it is not clear if they will be good or bad, but are possible: the u.s. court system has been all but shut down during the pandemic. some jails have released large numbers of lesser offenders to prevent pandemic blooms. this pandemic straw will break the judicial backlog’s back, and a number of new approaches will take root. i predict this will also force legal reforms in how trials are conducted, which may even cause major changes in the legal profession. sam s. adams, a 24 year veteran of ibm now working as a senior research scientist in artificial intelligence for rti international, wrote, “the confluence of the global pandemic and the u.s. presidential election cycle is likely to accelerate a large number of large scale changes in multiple domains and industries. given the caveats of no multiple concurrent pandemics and no revolution scale social unrest, these changes will likely accelerate a number of positive transitions that will improve life in general. j. scott marcus, an economist, political scientist and engineer who works as a telecommunications consultant, predicted, “the impact of the pandemic is large, but the world will eventually recover (assuming that the virus does not mutate to a still more dangerous form). this was the case in 1919 and there is no reason to expect anything different here. changes such as remote work, teleconferencing, telemedicine and remote learning are mostly positive. the changes that have emerged were technically feasible for years but held up by institutional rigidities. “things will not go back to where they were   not entirely, anyway. as a whole, i think most people will be worse off, not solely because of the pandemic, but at least as much due to intensifying trade wars, a decline in international cooperation and more. the impact of climate change will still not be catastrophic, but it will continue to grow. i hope for the acceleration of trends toward remote work for jobs in the upper income quartile or two. the greatly increased use of teleconferencing, with a corresponding decline in travel; tourism will take a long time to return to previous levels, if ever. increased reliance on telemedicine. a major retooling of the education and training systems was needed anyway, not only to shift to remote learning (which is not simply the same as current practice done from afar), but also to lifelong learning. “my worries are information bubbles, fake news and their negative impact on traditional (more reliable) news media and public broadcasting. i worry about the growing dominance of a small number of platforms. my worry for ai and big data is challenges with explainability.” glenn edens, professor at thunderbird school of global management, arizona state university, previously a vice president at parc, observed, “there is a good chance by 2025 society will have forgotten all about the current crisis. a key question is, how soon do we find a viable vaccine and how long does it take to put that into production, and when does it become part of the annual flu season vaccine? if for some reason a vaccine and treatment continue to be elusive, then all bets are off for recovery by 2025. “the economic fallout from the current crisis will likely take a decade to ‘fix’   we should be prepared for five to seven years of lower growth prospects, higher taxes, continued failures of firms and an uneven recovery. it is reasonable to expect that some industries will find it harder to return to ‘pre covid 19’ status quo. some will not recover   for example, e commerce, on demand delivery and working from home are not retreating. many firms are realizing they don’t need huge commercial real estate or physical infrastructure   i’d predict a significant restructuring of commercial real estate. the displacement of brick and mortar retail by e commerce, which has been steady and slow, has been kicked into high gear   how will the convenience of e commerce versus the experience of physical retail unfold? my bet is that many brands and chains will not survive and the very nature of a ‘shopping mall’ will have to change dramatically   these facilities will survive, as will site specific retail experiences. consumption = convenience, so i’d suggest e commerce is likely to jump to account for 50% or more of all retail sales and it will continue to grow. “the conflict of the individual versus the good for the commons has been vividly brought to the forefront, and so far the results are not looking so good for the commons. while working from home (or remotely under different scenarios) is not perfect or anywhere near as good as it could be, it is here to stay. many firms are discovering it is very cost effective. the jury is still out on the true impact of productivity gains or losses due to working from home. many of the firms i’ve talked to are seriously thinking about incorporating working from home as a long term part of their human resources and commercial real estate strategy. this will continue to provide funding for more innovations in the communications technology sector   we are already seeing improved security and some small advances in user interface and user experience improvements (we may finally get real spatialized audio). “there is a dark side of these tools, which is not well understood yet   many managers i’ve spoken to are intrigued with (giddy about?) the increased tools for monitoring employees, their work output, productivity, work styles and intricate details of their behavior   this will be exploited and may lead to unintended consequences. at the same time, it is interesting that the ‘internet’ didn’t collapse   it held up pretty well, and it is pretty clear that investing in high speed internet access is going to continue to set geographic areas apart economically. we seem to also be getting more serious about security. longer term it is clear, of course, that society will continue to increase its dependence on digitally intermediated systems for every facet of life: health care, education, shopping, groceries, entertainment, transportation, work and finance   that trend is unstoppable. at the same time, we are a social species and we crave social interaction   risks will not sway us. :)” gregory shannon, chief scientist at the cert division of carnegie mellon university’s software engineering institute observed, “i see willingness to trust and flexibility in trust as a key element of the ‘new normal.’ previous trust modes/models/habits/norms will evolve, and those most successful in the new normal will have adapted/optimized their approaches on trust. those who don’t adapt/evolve their approach to trust will be hampered, inefficient and even isolated in the new normal. i see willingness to trust and flexibility in trust as a key element of the ‘new normal.’ previous trust modes/models/habits/norms will evolve, and those most successful in the new normal will have adapted/optimized their approaches on trust. “the new normal will continue and accelerate the move towards digital spaces, which, without in person interaction, are abstract and hard for many to grasp. i find it interesting that many modern efficiencies are based on getting many people physically close together. transportation, sports events, restaurants, education, work teams, hospitals, city parks, gyms, places of worship, fifth avenue, etc. who and where do we each trust to get close to others? can we get ‘close’ in a meaningful way via technology? it’s not clear to me how. “will we see an exodus from cities as density becomes more of a bug than a feature? how will we meet new people? will it be much more localized, like to our neighborhood? i expect a real increase in social isolation, especially for those older, or less tech savvy, or with few resources to connect virtually. i expect smart virtual avatars/agents will make and manage connections. they can suggest/negotiate introductions to new colleagues with relevant yet diverse perspectives. the agents could also warn/caution when new colleagues seem insincere, untrustworthy or even artificial. “i expect we’ll see much better virtual collaboration technologies. from wikis and such to continuous virtual conferencing. i worry about the availability of accessible, stable and secure bandwidth. the current ‘best effort’ residential connectivity plans are failing. there are too many dropped calls, glitchy video, audio drops (every other word) and a lack of scalability for group discussions. privacy is also certainly an issue. if these are not addressed well it will increase social isolation.” chris arkenberg, research manager at deloitte’s center for technology, media and telecommunications, predicted, “while a five year horizon will see some classes of society claiming benefits from the covid 19 discontinuity such as more remote working arrangements, fewer commutes, better habits in many high traffic institutions, etc., many will still be under the economic downturn. many jobs are simply disappearing under the twin engines of small business destruction and enterprise scale automation. more job providers are already seeking the security of automation to hedge against the next crisis. eventually covid 19 will also likely accelerate the deconstructing of an aging capitalism that fails to allocate resources to teachers, workers, ‘essential services’ and many other economic sectors that have been undervalued while favoring rent seekers and financial vaporware that adds no real value to society. this will take 10 years at least. eventually covid 19 will also likely accelerate the deconstructing of an aging capitalism that fails to allocate resources to teachers, workers, ‘essential services’ and many other economic sectors that have been undervalued while favoring rent seekers and financial vaporware that adds no real value to society. “at the same time, global political leaders who recently rode a far right, nationalistic wave of anti immigration will see more election cycles by 2025. with such strong economic challenges, it is unclear if nationalism will retain its influence or if there will be a mandate for a more technocratic and educated leadership. one might hope for the latter, given the [trump] administration’s failure to manage covid 19. in short, a five year horizon will likely still feel disrupted and degraded for most, while a 10 year horizon may see some of the sea changes underway that were only amplified by covid 19 start to yield meaningful results. “the reality is that global, national and state institutions are being reconceived under the impact of globalization, the internet, global warming and, now, global pandemic. there will be a rocky transition to the next stable state.” kenneth cukier, senior editor at the economist and co author of “big data,” said, “i see this for 2025: economic crises, less global trade and constant international political conflict. companies substituting technology (machines and algorithms) for human labor. a rise in populist or ‘infotainment’ governments means serious, long term problems aren’t addressed by the state, and well meaning civil institutions can’t have the impact they’d like. “the educated, wealthy, moderates (aka ‘elites’) retreat even further from mainstream society, believing the situation unfixable and to avoid being a target of attack. worthy social justice issues like racism get hijacked by extremists, creating a ‘cultural revolution’ of intolerance that crimps free expression and ideas. “new technologies will greatly improve the quality of life, such as ai in health care. we will be able to scale up productivity to new heights by applying software and data to all areas of economic activity. tech will also be on the front lines of responding to climate change. but tech will continue to foment huge problems like misinformation and social platforms that drive people apart. it will create new problems, such as dominating the business landscape by dint of size and scale that offline players can’t compete against. and in tech will be the vital ingredient of a new class of weaponry without safeguards to control it well.” stephen downes, senior research officer for digital technologies with the national research council of canada, commented, “the net result of the pandemic will be an increased recognition of the role of governance and civil society, seen in an increased interest in social and economic support, including, for example, the need for public health care and for income support. it will also be seen in greater social and civic responsibility, including new controls on policing and greater access to services for minorities and underserved populations. and it will be seen in a wider recognition of social responsibility, for example a return to more progressive taxation, especially corporate taxation, as a response to income inequality. “the most significant change could be summarized with the slogan ‘protocol, not platform,’ as mike masnick argued last year. the idea is that instead of depending on a specific social media application to connect with friends and colleagues, people could use the application of their choice and use a common messaging standard. this makes it more difficult for platforms to shape discourse using algorithms and to monetize discourse using tracking and advertising. the current structure of dialogue and media privileges extreme and provocative content, which tends to polarize society and to make it more difficult to come to consensus on social issues. discourse that is more cooperative and creative enables constructive responses to be adopted society wide to pressing issues of the day, including but not limited to equity, environment, prejudice and policing. with common communications protocols, solutions to pressing issues will begin to emerge. common protocols also enable greater security, through such mechanisms of zero knowledge proofs, for example. this allows better insight into the effectiveness of social programs and enables governments and critics to evaluate innovation on more than merely financial or economic criteria. “our experience during the pandemic showed clearly how even modest improvements in interoperable communications can have a significant effect. before the pandemic, there was no incentive to support widely accessible cross platform video conferencing. then we had zoom, a simple tool everyone could use, and suddenly we could work from home, learn remotely or host conferences online. having learned how convenient and efficient so many online services have become, we will be much less likely to commute to work, attend residence based campuses or fly to conferences. this makes the world of work, learning and commerce much more accessible to large populations who previously did not have the resources to participate, and greatly increases our efficiency and productivity. when technology divides us, it also disempowers us, as everything about us becomes subservient to the conflict. our agency, our identity, our activities   all these become the means and mechanisms for one faction to fight the other. “my concern about the near future is that our technology choices will force us into mutually exclusive and competing factions. these factions may be defined politically or may be defined by class or race, by economic status or by power and control. technological dystopia occurs when one faction uses technology against the other, perhaps by means of surveillance and spying, perhaps by means of manipulation and misinformation or ever by means of hacking and disruption. when technology divides us, it also disempowers us, as everything about us becomes subservient to the conflict. our agency, our identity, our activities   all these become the means and mechanisms for one faction to fight the other. this is a worry about technological public spaces becoming private spaces: there’s no application we can use or no online space we can go that isn’t owned by some entity and designed to further the objectives of that entity, with the social goods of individual freedom and social cohesion taking a back seat to those objectives. it’s the sort of world where we no longer own things, but can merely lease them, subject to the terms, conditions and digital rights management of the technology company. it’s a world in which there is no space for creativity or free expression outside the constraints of end user licensing agreements, and no public space for discussion, decision and action where the needs of society can prevail over private and corporate interests. by 2025 we will have a clear idea whether we are slipping into technological dystopia. the more difficult we find it to interact on an equal basis with people from other countries, other cultures, other political beliefs or even other platforms or social networks, the less likely we are to be able to find common solutions to global problems. the more prevalent surveillance and control through technological means becomes, the less likely a less powerful people can redress the excesses of the more powerful. these, eventually, will manifest in physical symptoms of dystopia: shortages, outages, civil unrest, open conflict.” a lawyer and former law school dean who specializes in technology issues predicted, “there will be greater awareness of need for broadscale safety nets for employees   workforce employment protections (such as those implemented by eu). there will be greater societal demands for public health and safety protections supported by governments. there will be a widespread demand for more effective leadership of government institutions. just contrast how the leadership overseeing the covid pandemic problems in new zealand, much of europe, taiwan and south korea with the anemic, chaotic leadership in the u.s. people will demand more and better leadership traits in their elected leaders. my hopes are for better social media ‘ethics’ by movements to constrain and reduce hate speech, overt hatred online and manifest dishonesty on social and political issues. a greater societal awareness of need to rely on truth telling online, especially the major influential sources (facebook, twitter, etc.) while recognizing that some things are opinions and should be respected as long as not false, defamatory, hateful, likely to inspire hatred, etc. there will be a movement from the essential lawlessness of the internet to a demand for a more civil and civic discourse approach. i worry over the tech companies’ lack of respect for the importance of civic discourse on their platforms. much of the social media space is essentially the wild west: no laws, no rules, hate speech is permitted if it supports advertising revenues, etc. those companies’ employees are revolting within the context of their employment, and they are demanding that the corporate leadership grow a spine and step up against the voices of discord, hatred, anarchy, etc.” amali de silva mitchell, a futurist and consultant participating in multistakeholder internet governance processes, said, “technology will ease the work life balance; increase productivity; help reduce carbon emissions; allow for savings on infrastructure expenditures such as roads, although there should be more spending on internet infrastructure and actions to enable universal access. life may seem to speed up, and new technologies that were supposed to still be in development for a decade will become available sooner. in person social life with a human touch will be restricted and perhaps even mistrusted. the packed pub or tea house will only be open to those who can provide proof of vaccination. “evidence based identification to show ‘purity of health’ and even health histories will be required everywhere. face coverings will be commonplace, and each person may be embedded with an id chip that can be tracked on the street. outward appearances may appear to be the same as today, but the underlying monitoring of each person will be much greater. people will trade privacy for a semblance of the old normal. people will become more aware of their actions and feelings and be knowledgeable about repercussions. it is possible that brain waves will be used to monitor the emotional space of the public so as to predict behavior of crowds. we may see new forms of safeguards or barriers in projections via holograms which will also be common at business meetings. “ai will be everywhere, but there will be issues with the quality. the individual’s self identity could decline, and the need to conform to a norm increase, as being out of step will create the need to sort out the exceptions. people will become more managed, spontaneous behavior will be discouraged, although creativity at work will be encouraged. humans will be replaced in many settings by robots, forcing them to compete; economic security may become something of the past unless the state provides universal benefits. people will guard their minds as if they are a gold mine as that will be the ticket to their individual sustainability. “medical technologies may assist humans to live a full life, from telemedicine 24/7, to new medications from ai developments, to new monitoring devices and delivery devices, prosthetics, etc. items such as clothing, footwear, nutrition, household goods, vehicles, etc., could be designed with technology to optimize output as well as service and be produced or delivered at reduced cost. waste minimization, safekeeping, comfort, specification and adaptation will be key. minimizing expenditures will be key for the average working person, hence technologies that assist with that goal to produce the product or service at little cost the consumer will do well, hence the trend to ai driven technologies for production, etc. wearable technologies will be important, as people keep all their possessions close to them for safekeeping, hence there will be more and more micro products and perhaps the use of holograms to assist with screen display. voice and sound technology will assist the elderly and disabled in a very beneficial manner, as will text to speech and speech to text. these applications will be developed further to assist with everyday work productivity. the need to remember things will be something of the past. “people are giving up a lot of privacy to receive the benefits of technology. data risk management in an ethical manner is critical. standards will lag behind new technical developments. the even greater risk will be the lack of transparency around emerging technologies, and thus the lack of feedback from the public to mitigate the risks of these new developments until an event occurs. a few companies will have data concentrated in their hands and any mismanagement, including poor ethical standards, could have serious outcomes.” greg sherwin, vice president for engineering and information technology at singularity university, responded, “the new normal will include a greater awareness of systemic dependencies and the need for social goods. linear thinking and highly individualistic, reductionist approaches to society and the planet will shift towards communitarianism. the myth of social atomism is being broken and more will observe the harm of that model on individual belonging and health as well as social and planetary cohesion and survival. that being said, privacy will continue to slide away as a mythical value. algorithms will continue to rule our lives but will be questioned as to their validity, bias and rules for human appeal. we will also have quickly discovered before 2021 that we over indexed for how we thought the pandemic would change our view towards health in our surroundings. instead of the overarching narratives about how offices and architecture will never be the same, we will have found common ground with the human experiences of 1919   where everyone quickly returned to their normal social habits.” mike godwin, former general counsel for the wikimedia foundation, wrote, “the ‘new normal’ has the potential to be more humane for workers in many ways. first, it seems clear that we are learning rapidly the extent to which ‘knowledge workers’ can work effectively from home, provided that they have the right informational infrastructure that supports such remote work. cutting down on the need to commute, making schedules flexible and increasing the ability for employees to be caregivers and parents while working will be helpful. “second, there is a growing consensus that providing income security is the right approach to coping with abrupt economic downturns that can be caused by pandemics, by climate change, and by social unrest associated with both pandemics and unrest   including increased migration, which will be a major disruptor in this century. the greatest single improvement i hope for is increased access to reliable broadband internet for the purposes of remote work, as well as the more efficient coordination of aid and resources in response to weather crises or public health crises. the digital devices at the endpoints of the broadband infrastructure (personal computers and phones, primarily, but more and more devices with other functions) already will have a great deal of local processing power, but the key point on the critical path will be the prioritization of broadband access that’s inexpensive, robust, capacious and widely available in small towns and rural areas. enabling competition and appropriate government subsidies and other support will likely play a central role in keeping prices down and keeping capacity rising. i worry that processing power and widespread data sharing will make it increasingly easy for individual privacy to be eroded, not least through technologies like facial recognition but also through traffic analysis and aggregation of individual transactional patterns. the amount of processing power this kind of monitoring and tracking of individuals will require is already here.” david krieger, director of the institute for communication and leadership, based in switzerland, commented, “the growing need for a viable vision of a global future will (hopefully) shift political discourse away from traditional ideologies toward new horizons. even if the impact of medical science on politics may be short lived and ambiguous, the impact of digital technologies on society is enormous and will continue. both in the private and the public sectors, in education, health care, research and other areas, organizations of all kinds have realized that home office, virtual delivery of services and products, virtual collaborative work, new work and decentralization function very well and reduce costs as well as solve pressing environmental problems. “in the trade off between liberty and security/health, security seems to have better cards. this becomes even more apparent when we consider that the shift of more governmental and business activities into the cyber realm will bring greater dangers of cyber criminality and cyber warfare, which in turn demand much greater investments in cybersecurity, or indeed, entirely new concepts of security and accompanying social and organizational changes. “many digital immigrants have been quickly and even forcibly ‘naturalized’ into the digital world, and traditional top down, command and control management has received perhaps a death blow. there is a clear need to reduce bureaucracy and cut red tape, not only in health care but in all areas of society. the virus has disabled not only many people, but also many traditional convictions about social and economic order, about the way things have to be done. “a further impact of the pandemic will probably lead to increasing demands for transparency and open information. already many accuse china of dangerous censorship and secrecy with regard to information about the outbreak. scientists have joined in a worldwide exchange of data and research. publishers have torn down paywalls. open access to information of all kinds is considered a priority. intellectual property claims are becoming suspect. in addition to this, governments are deploying tracking apps, and citizens are accepting more disclosure of so called ‘personal information.’ “in the trade off between liberty and security/health, security seems to have better cards. this becomes even more apparent when we consider that the shift of more governmental and business activities into the cyber realm will bring greater dangers of cyber criminality and cyber warfare, which in turn demand much greater investments in cybersecurity, or indeed, entirely new concepts of security and accompanying social and organizational changes. taken together, it appears that in the wake of the pandemic, we are moving faster towards the data driven global network society than ever before. “some have predicted that the pandemic will end the ‘techlash,’ since what we need to survive is more information and not less about everyone and everything. this information must be analyzed and used as quickly as possible, which spurs on investments in ai and big data analytics. calls for privacy, for regulation of tech giants and for moratoriums on the deployment of tracking, surveillance and ai are becoming weaker and losing support throughout the world. perhaps traditional notions of civil liberties need to be revised and updated for a world in which connectivity, flow, transparency and participation are the major values.” the sections of this report that follow organize hundreds of additional expert quotes under the headings that follow the common themes listed in the tables at the beginning of this report. for more on how this canvassing was conducted, including full question wording, see “about this canvassing.” fresh data delivery saturday mornings weekly updates on the world of news & information topics 901 e st. nw, suite 300washington, dc 20004usa(+1) 202 419 4300 | main(+1) 202 857 8562 | fax(+1) 202 419 4372 | media inquiries about pew research center pew research center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. it does not take policy positions. the center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data driven research. pew research center is a subsidiary of the pew charitable trusts, its primary funder. © 2025 pew research center

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henry david thoreau (july 12, 1817   may 6, 1862) was an american essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. a leading transcendentalist, thoreau is best known for his book walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “civil disobedience” (originally published as “resistance to civil government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. his literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and yankee attention to practical detail. he was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.
supported by renters an engineer who moved from london to new york was planning to live alone, but ended up doing just the opposite   and loving it. by samantha maldonado a move across the atlantic ocean into the arms of nearly two dozen housemates was not what ishan abeysekera had envisioned for himself. but that’s his life now, and he’s embraced it. “i basically went from nearly living on my own for the first time in my adult life in london to basically living with 23 others,” he said. “i’m just like, you know what, if you did and it feels right, you change your plans and adapt accordingly.” mr. abeysekera, 32, an engineer originally from sri lanka, had been living in london with roommates since he was 18 and in college. in 2021, he was planning to try living solo and was just about to buy a flat when his company offered him a position in new york city. by the next fall, he had moved to the united states and into a temporary apartment in the financial district, paid for by the company. he lived there for two months as he hunted for one bedrooms and studios in the east village, but was not impressed. then he looked for something different. “i googled ‘communal living in brooklyn,’ and cohabs came up,” he said. cohabs is a company that offers “co living” for people 18 or older in shared homes in new york, london, brussels and paris, among other cities. it plans to have 16 houses in brooklyn and manhattan open by the end of june.

 recent and archived work by samantha maldonado for the new york times a couple who finally live full time in the city sometimes can’t believe they have their own home in the middle of the craziness. by samantha maldonado two young actors were prepared to work hard to make it in new york theater. the rental market proved to be cutthroat. by samantha maldonado after more than 40 years in a williamsburg loft, noah jemison says the benefits of his tenure have come with a world of changes outside his windows. by samantha maldonado an engineer who moved from london to new york was planning to live alone, but ended up doing just the opposite   and loving it. by samantha maldonado a woman in a hud subsidized apartment in a building for older new yorkers bristles at the notion that she would stay home and “watch these four walls.” by samantha maldonado a woman with a young son started looking for a place before her lease expired, but even her most far fetched solutions   buy an rv?   haven’t panned out.