Where the Power Moves

Vol. 4, No. 2

The future belongs neither to the largest firm nor the lone genius, but to those who understand where authority now lives.

Hannah Arendt understood freedom as the capacity to begin.

When you look back at history through that lens, you begin to notice how often the right to begin has shifted hands. For nearly two centuries, it mostly lived inside industrial institutions. Factories, corporations, and bureaucracies determined what mattered, translated ambition into plans, and organised people into stable roles. Software reinforced that world, embedding procedures into systems that could run with consistency and scale. We even learned to ship software as if it were produced on an assembly line.

Beginning was something you did inside an organization, within rules that were already written.

Then the internet inverted the architecture and gradually rendered that script obsolete. By connecting everyone to everything, it shortened the distance between idea and distribution. Audiences became reachable, and demand became visible. Coordinating action no longer required the same institutional weight. Scarcity shifted from pure production capacity toward attention and network position. Stability gave way to fluidity, and organisations built for control had to learn how to move within environments shaped by shifting preferences and constant change.

This rewiring has not been seamless. As inherited structures lose their grip, society experiences a growing disorientation. The old playbook no longer offers reliable guidance, yet a new one has not fully taken shape. In moments like this, uncertainty creates space. When the script weakens, authorship becomes possible.

Over time, participation itself began to look different. Economic life now unfolds through millions of small operators such as creators, developers, consultants, and micro-teams, many of whom would never call themselves businesses yet carry the responsibilities of one. Their work forms around projects and communities, supported by tools that once required significant institutional backing. Increasingly, they define the environments in which they operate, shaping their own niches rather than competing inside someone else’s structure and, in doing so, building their own ponds.

At the same time, this fragmentation rests on a parallel consolidation beneath it. A powerful layer of infrastructure has formed through cloud services, payment systems, and platforms designed to make these capabilities widely accessible. Scale continues to matter in this environment. It shows up as shared foundations that enable many smaller actors to build and operate on their own terms.

What this amounts to is a profound shift in authority. Individuals today can build, distribute, and monetise with forms of leverage that once belonged almost exclusively to institutions. Organisations that once required entire teams can now find themselves competing with a single focused operator who, together with many others like them, forms part of a loosely coordinated and increasingly capable network. Systems can generate and scale at extraordinary speed, yet they do not determine what is worth pursuing. Direction remains a human act.

As economic life disperses into countless small beginnings supported by common infrastructures, authority moves closer to the individual, and with it, freedom.

Beginning no longer depends on institutional permission. It rests with those willing to take responsibility.

Becoming an AI-first software-intensive company

This doesn’t reduce human responsibility; it changes its nature. Humans remain accountable for outcomes, but they express their intent at a higher level: what should be optimized, what trade-offs are acceptable and what values must never be violated. AI systems then operate continuously within these boundaries, making thousands or millions of micro-decisions that would be impossible for humans to manage.

Jan Bosch | 8 Minutes

Petri Dishes, Not Factories

However, our mental models are lagging behind our enthusiasm. The pieces of the puzzle are there but we’re held back by a monolithic definition of what ‘work’ is. Looking around, most software engineers are fervidly vibe-coding every idea they have and looking for tools to build more, faster. So where’s the problem..? Well, most ideas are bad. In practice building the thing is not nearly as much work as designing it.

Ben Follington | 6 Minutes

The Five Pillars of Work: The Hidden Identity Criss of Portfolio Careers

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d have to unlearn. Leaving my job turned into what I can only describe as unlearning life. Peeling back the scripts I’d absorbed through out life without even realizing. Taught in school, reinforced in university, hardened in the early years of my career. Scripts that we adopt eagerly because they offer direction, safety and approval. But to choose a different path and to actually do things differently, you have to unlearn nearly everything you’ve ever been taught.

Iwana Johannsen | 15 Minutes

AI ads, the end of SaaS, and the future of media

Today, if you want to be a writer, what you want to do is make your own pond. The internet enables the creation of a million different ponds. You get to define your own pond and be the only and biggest fish in it. That’s how you succeed. AI makes that possible for all sorts of content and all sorts of businesses—lots of smaller-scale individual entrepreneurs or small teams who don’t really fit in the Salesforce-driven, seat-based model of many of these companies. There might be a big return to self-serve, or maybe people will just roll their own because their needs aren’t that large.

Ben Thompson in Stripe | 90 Minutes