My desk is a disaster. Cold brew from this morning, now room temperature. A stack of unopened mail thats been piling up since the holiday break. Outside my window: rain. Not the romantic kind. This downpour is more Mary J. Blige and Ja Rule than Soul for Real. When I log on to my first video call of the day, I see the same gloom in everyone else’s backgrounds.
Well, everyone except Sam.
Unlike most people at the Seattle-based organization, Sam, a content strategist, has been working remotely from Mexico for the past four months. His Zoom backdrop almost looks virtual. The solar glare on his forehead makes questions about the weather seem rhetorical. His floor-to-ceiling windowswith palm trees swaying on the other sidescream, “I’m living my best life at 28,000 pesos per month.
On a recent call, when Sam casually mentioned grabbing lunch at a restaurant on the beach, I felt it. That ugly little pang of envy.
Mase and 112 have a hilarious song about jealous men. I could never relate … until recently. The remote work revolution has tested my emotional limits. Taking Zoom meetings from Zanzibar. Sending emails from Barcelona. Slack messages sent poolside. The digital nomad lifestyle sold us a fantasy: Why be miserable in Maryland when you could be equally employed in Morocco?
Last month, Sam and his tropical background were absent for a day. He was offline the following day as well. His Slack status read traveling. Everyone on the call knew what was up.
After Mexican authorities killed a major cartel leader in Februaryreportedly with U.S. helpparts of Jalisco erupted in violent retaliation that led to road blockades, burning vehicles, and warnings for Americans in Puerto Vallarta to stay indoors. Sam was in Mexico City, about 500 miles away, but he decided not to take any chances and haul ass. Turns out that work from anywhere hits differently when the “anywhere” is under a travel advisory.
I understood the appeal that landed him beyond stateside borders in the first place. Once upon a time, I spun my desk globe and contemplated an expat adventure of my own.
I’d been to Dubai years ago and loved it: the energy, the extravagance, the man-made island. After I got home, I started imagining a version of my life with better weather and a better skyline. I did some cursory research about relocating there. Looked at neighborhoods. Crunched the numbers. Then I took an in-office job here, and the idea disappeared like shisha smoke in the air.
That old fantasy came back to mind recently after the U.S. attacked Iran, which responded with missile and drone strikes all around the Middle East. Airports in Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubaimajor travel hubs for all, including remote workershave been experiencing shutdowns and delays amid regional instability. I keep coming across tales of Americans stuck out there, steadily refreshing the State Department website, trying to figure out whether they need to escape by any means necessary.
I know Black folks who left the States entirelytired of the politics, the anti-Blackness, the everyday microaggressions. They went searching for destinations where they could breathe easier. Accra. Lisbon. Bangkok. The digital nomad life offered an escape from Uncle Sams oppression.
But heres the thing: American foreign policy has a long reach. When the U.S. starts launching airstrikes, it doesnt matter if youre in Atlanta or Abu Dhabi; youre still American. And suddenly that little blue booklet feels less like a golden ticket.
Obviously, every place isn’t unsafe. I’d never discourage anyone from chasing the digital nomad dream. If you’ve got the opportunity and the resources, do it. See the world. Take your conference calls from Costa Rica. All Im saying is that current events have shown me another perspective. The recent news made me realize how quickly paradise can turn into frantically checking Skyscanner for a flight to literally anywhere else.
Sam has since resurfaced on our team calls. Hes in London now, staying with a friend until he figures out his next move. His Zoom background was gray that first day. Overcast. It looked a lot like mine.
Hows the weather over there? someone asked.
Rainy, Sam said. But Im good with it.
Maybe I projected a lot onto Sam. Maybe hes just a guy with decent Wi-Fi, a great view, a tatted-up passport, and quarterly goals just like mine. But in my head, he was the poster child of the digital nomad experience.
I looked out my window at the familiar downpour and realized something: Im still open to working from abroad.
Im just no longer romanticizing the people already doing it.
I teach a course on AI and filmmaking at USCs School of Cinematic Arts, and lately, rather than planning each session well in advance, Ive been structuring the class the night before. Ill browse platforms like X, Substack, and YouTube, selecting the most provocative articles and video clips to present the following morning.
Its a testament to how quickly artificial intelligences relationship to filmmaking is evolving: Each week brings newoften startlingdevelopments.
The next morning in class, my students and I debate the ethics, the aesthetics, and the storytelling changes taking place in these collaborations with AI.
And were not alone: Throughout Hollywood, everyoneaspiring actors and filmmakers, stars, screenwriters, and studio execsseems to have a take on whats coming next. But I think three trends in particular are going to be hot topics of conversation at this years Oscars parties.
Nothing uncanny about this clip
In February 2026, a 15-second AI-generated video clip of Tom Cruise battling Brad Pitt on a burned-out highway overpass went viral.
Depending on the viewer, the video elicited either admiration, outrage, or existential hand-wringing.
Created by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson via a generative-AI tool called Seedance 2.0, the video marked yet another milestone in the propulsive growth of AI tools.
Seedance 2.0which was developed by ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTokis now one of the many AI tools available to create short-form video clips. But unlike most AI-generated videos, Pitt and Cruise dont look creepy, uncanny, or animated in the clip, which almost perfectly mimics live-action footage. The appearance of two A-list stars in a fairly realistic scene created by a relatively unknown director using stolen likenesses jolted the industry.
A brief clip featuring AI-generated avatars of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise stunned the film industry.
The backlash was swift. Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that the video was generated from a dataset that most likely includes Disneys copyrighted characters. The actors union, SAG-AFTRA, pointed to the videos blatant infringement of the actors likenesses, as well as their voices.
SAG-AFTRA stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by Bytedances new AI video model Seedance 2.0, the guild wrote in a statement. This practice, the guild added, undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood, while disregarding law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent.
In class, after watching the video, we explored the ethics of using someones likeness without permission, the challenges facing actors who build careers based on their unique ability to embody characters, and what the future holds for our understanding of acting.
If filmmakers can prompt fake actors to deliver precise performances, where does that leave human actors?
In with the old
Since 2023, the skyline of the Las Vegas strip has been dominated by an illuminated orb called the Sphere: an entertainment complex featuring a 360-degree LED screen covering 160,000 square feet (14,864 square meters). The Sphere recently surpassed 2 million tickets sold for a reimagining of the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
The film, which premiered in August 2024, was shortened, its color was enhanced, and it was stretched to expand across the interior of the dome. AI was used to transfer the imagery from the films original, modest aspect ratio to the giant dome. This required generating new imagery around the edges of the original shots in whats known as AI outpainting. The technology was also deployed to boost the original films resolution and to enhance certain scenes.
Some critics fretted that this fairly radical augmentation of the original classic would offend viewers. Instead, it has drawn them in droves to the Sphere, where theyve been willing to shell out between US$100 and $200 per ticket.
Not bad for a movie about a girl from Kansas made in 1939.
Given the resounding success of The Wizard of Oz, experts expect producers to plumb the film archives for other potential hits and enhance them with AI before screening them in venues as varied as IMAX theaters and Cosm, another 360-degree dome with locations in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta.
Or AI can simply be used to create material that was never completed for a historic film.
In fact, The New Yorker recently profiled AI media entrepreneur Edward Saatchi, who is working to recreate and reincorporate lost footage from Orson Welles 1942 feature The Magnificent Ambersons. While Welles was in Brazil shooting a documentary, executives at RKO Radio Pictures reedited the film without his approval after a poor preview screening. They cut around 45 minutes, replaced the original ending with a happier one, and destroyed most of the footage that had been removed.
Saatchis idea is to build a dataset that includes the existing film, as well as scripts, notes, images, and even new performances by actors. Then he plans to use his AI platform, Showrunner, to create new scenes from this data.
While Saatchihopes to honor the directors creative vision by producing the film he originally intended, his efforts open up some thorny questions.
Is it appropriate to take an existing artwork and revise it without the creators input? Isnt there something sacrosanct about a film, the intentions of the director, and the performances of the actors in a films original form? To what extent should these questions be overlooked if refashioning old movies will introduce them to new audiences?
Fewer opportunities?
Theres also an undercurrent of anxiety in my classes. What will happen, my students often wonder, once they graduate?
Theyre worried that within a year or two, AI will have replaced entry-level film industry jobs, from concept artists to apprentice-level editors, before theyve even had a chance to enter the workforce.
They have reason to fear.
In 2024, the Animation Guild published a sobering report claiming that by 2026, creative workers will be facing an era of disruption, defined by the consolidation of some job roles, the replacement of existing job roles with new ones, and the elimination of many jobs entirely.
Some of those predictions have borne out: 41,000 jobs in film and television have disappeared in Los Angeles County alone over the past three years.
But Ive tried to counter the hard statistics with some stories of thoughtful practices.
For example, filmmaker Paul Trillo at the AI studio Asteria has talked about how he seeks to keep artists at the center of the process. When he detailed the companys work on a music video for the singer-songwriter Cuco, he was keen to highlight the number of artists working on the project. Yes, AI tools were used. But they were integrated in a way that replaced the tedious work, not the creative practice.
Rather than removing [artists] from the process, it actually allowed them to do a lot more so a small team can dream a lot bigger, Trillo explains at the end of the video.
In January 2026, the management consulting firm McKinsey published a report that largely echoes Trillos positive outlook. It forecasts more adoption of AI throughout the industry. But it also points to ways that the technology could lead to different kinds of work and open up new possibilities.
For example, as AI-generated scenes become commonplace, studios will need technicians who know how to blend real footage with digitally created worlds. And as AI lowers the cost of producing polished films and shows, it could allow more micro-studios and independent filmmakers to create professional-quality content.
At the same time, the report also quotes a studio executive who concedes that AI could represent a more significant platform shift than we have ever seen before in our industry.
So its no wonder my students, along with varied critics, commentators, and industry professionals, are nervous.
However, from where I stand, Im convinced that the industry will weather this radical disruption. Its adapted to big changes in the past: the addition of sound in the 1920s, the threat posed by videotape in the 1980s, and streaming in the 2000s.
In the end, people will always crave new, artfully told stories. While the filmmaking tools and job market may be in transition, that core need for storytelling is not going away.
Holly Willis is a professor of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Overworked and underpaid has become the modern workplace anthem. The internet is full of advice on how to negotiate harder, quiet quit, or jump ship. Its an easy narrative to embrace: If you feel undervalued, the system must have failed you.
That story is comforting. Its also costly.
While genuine exploitation exists, most people stop short of asking the harder, and far more lucrative question: What is my contribution actually worth in the market?
Effort Is Not Currency
We have a tendency to measure our value by our level of exhaustion. We tally up the stress, the late nights, and the emotional labor. But markets do not pay for perspiration. They pay for results.
If you feel underpaid, the first step isnt indignation; its an honest audit. You must be able to answer four questions in cold, commercial terms:
What measurable problems do I solve?
What revenue do I influence or what cost do I reduce?
What risk do I remove from the business?
What capability exists in the business because I am here?
If you cannot answer these, your problem isn’t exploitation, its under-positioning.High performers dont just do the work; they translate that work into the language decision-makers value. That isn’t “self-promotion.” It is commercial maturity.
The Hidden Ego in the Hustle
Early in my career, I was once frustrated that my title didn’t match my workload. I felt overlooked. In hindsight, I wasnt being ignored, I was being developed.
The gap between who we believe we are and how we are officially labelled is where growth actually happens. It is an invitation to become the role before you are given the title.Sometimes the discomfort isnt about the workload. It is about the delay in validation. When we fixate on status over trajectory, we risk stalling the very progress we claim to want.
There is also a seductive benefit to the overworked and underpaid story: it absolves us.
If the organisation is “broken,” you don’t have to sharpen your skills.If leadership is “blind,” you don’t have to influence better.If the system is unfair, you dont have to examine your own performance.
That mindset protects the ego but freezes your growth.If you need the title to act like the next level, youre not ready for it.
A more empowering stance assumes agency first. Ask:
If I am underpaid, what capability gap must I close?
If I am overlooked, how do I become unignorable?
If I am overwhelmed, what low-value work am I tolerating or enabling?
Agency isnt the denial of injustice. It is a refusal to surrender control.
Your Three-Point Audit
Before you demand a raise or polish your CV, run these filters:
1. The Value AuditList your core responsibilities. Next to each, write the tangible impactthe metric, the dollar value, or the efficiency gained. If you cant quantify it, estimate it. If it adds little value, question why its on your plate at all.
Many professionals exhaust themselves on low-impact work that makes them feel busy but not valuable. Ruthless prioritisation is a career accelerant.
2. The Skill AuditIdentify the capabilities demonstrated by those above you. It’s rarely about technical skill; it’s more often about things like strategic thinking, commercial judgment, stakeholder influence, and composure under pressure.
Promotions follow trust as much as competence. Trust is built through visible ownership and sound judgment exercised consistently over time.
3. The Leverage AuditWhen you negotiate from financial pressure, you negotiate from fear. Build personal resilience and market options first. You want to ask for your worth from a place of clarity, not desperation. Employers may empathise with your situation, but your financial stability will always be your responsibility.
When the System Actually Is the Problem
Lets be clear: Some organizations simply lack the capital, the courage, or the vision to reward talent.If you have delivered sustained, measurable results, operated at a higher level for months, and clearly articulated your impactyet nothing shiftsthat is a signal. At that point, leaving isn’t an act of disloyalty. It is an act of alignment.
For the leaders reading this: stretching your people without providing clarity or a path to reward breeds cynicism. Growth must be reciprocal, or your best people will eventually find a market that knows how to price them.
The Reframe
Stop asking, Why am I not being paid more? Start asking, Who must I become to be worth more, in any market?.
That question shifts you from reaction to construction. Compensation is almost always a lagging indicator of personal expansion. You rarely get paid first and grow later; the sequence frustrates the impatient, but it rewards the disciplined.
If you feel overworked and underpaid, don’t suppress the frustration. Study it. It may be pointing to genuine unfairness, or it may be pointing to your next evolution.
The difference lies in whether you look inward before you look outward. That isn’t the popular message, but its the only one that puts your future back in your hands.
Think of your favorite movie. Maybe you love it for the plot, or the nostalgia you get from watching it again and again. Now think of that same movie, but all the actors have been shuffled: An American who cant quite master a British accent, a 35-year-old playing a high schooler, a dramatic actor whose jokes fall flat.
The people who make sure that doesnt happen often go unrecognized, but now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has something to say about it. The inaugural Best Casting Oscar will be awarded at the 98th Academy Awards on March 15.
Its the first new Oscars category in more than two decades. (In 2002, Shrek was the first to win the then-recently debuted Best Animated Feature award.) And its a long time coming; there has been a casting branch of the Academy since 2013.
But even with the introduction of an Oscar to recognize achievement at (arguably) the highest level of the film industry, those outside the industry might not understand what casting directors do or what good casting looks like.
Fast Company talked to a few industry professionals to break down what happens behind closed doors in the casting processand why this new award is a win for unsung heroes across industries in the workforce.
Casting the part
Think of a film like its own little company that exists for the length of production: The director is at the head, but the casting director is one of the first people brought on to a project after thatmaking them vital to the film, even if they rarely make it to set.
Casting is really an integral part of the filmmaking process, Meredith Shea, the Academys chief membership, impact, and industry officer, says. Casting directors collaborate with the directors and producers right after they receive the script from a writer, so they really set the tone for the start of a film.
A great casting decision can make a movie a classicthink Heath Ledgers Joker or Sigourney Weaver in Alienbut a bad one can tank it. A films success can be won or lost before the director ever shouts Action!
When Naya Hemphill was in college, she wanted to be a director. She got into casting for student films as a way to be close to the preproduction process, but realized she enjoyed casting. It’s always exciting to discover how talent and script can fuse together, says Hemphill, who is now a casting intern with Blumhouse Productions. That fusionor lack thereofmight be what people are referring to when they talk about good versus bad casting.
If a film or television show is really well cast, you kind of don’t notice it, says casting director Paul Schnee. Hes worked on 2015s Spotlight with Mark Ruffalo, and with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts for 2013s August: Osage County.
Still, some Oscar votersand many moviegoersmight not understand exactly what goes into casting for a film, despite it being such a crucial piece of the projects success.
Thats why casting directors may be viewed as one of the many underappreciated, invisible members of a film crewa sentiment possibly underscored by the fact its taken this long to roll out a casting Oscar.
Casting is something that we do in private, Schnee says, and so it’s structurally a different kind of creative input.
It took three failed attempts to create the casting director-specific branch of the Academy. Once the branch was officially formed, the idea was that eventually we get our category to have, Schnee says. The branch governors and former casting director David Rubin, who served as Academy president from 2019 to 2022, were instrumental in finally securing the award.
Behind closed doors
The casting process works like this: Actors audition in person or, more often now, send in self-tape auditions. There are callbacks if necessary, and the process repeats until the casting director finds the person for the role.
Casting takes place before the rest of production, behind closed doors, making it a more nebulous role to a layperson. Its easy to understand what other crew members do because their impact is visible through elements like makeup or costumes.
If you were interviewing a costume designer, for example, he or she could show you some sketches about the evolution of their design, Schnee says. Because we’re dealing with human beings, I can’t show you auditions of people who didn’t get the job.
The process also takes a lot of collaboration, often in different locations: Oslo-based casting director Yngvill Kolset Haga worked with New York-based casting director Avy Kaufman on Sentimental Value, which is up for nine Oscars this year. You work towards the same direction even if you’re not in the same room, Haga says.
And they often arent in the same room. Because casting directors work in preproduction, they sometimes dont see what happens on setany changes during filming or editing might be complete surprises at the premiere. I was so delighted to see the magic that everyone did, Kaufman says about seeing Sentimental Value after production wrapped.
Given that, the new casting Oscar is a great example of how unsung heroes on teams need to be recognized for their contributions, too.
Adam Goodman, clinical professor at Northwestern Universitys McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, also directs the Universitys Center for Leadership. He works with executive teams in industry on leadership and teamwork. He says that in teams, there are roles that are perceived to be back in the background, but in fact without [them], the team fails.
Appreciating unrecognized team members is crucial to the success of an organization, with surveys suggesting theyd work even harder if they knew they would be recognized. Expressing gratitude for their contributions is an effective management tactic. And in the case of the new casting Oscar, its been a long time coming.
It’s long overdue. Ninety-eight years of Oscars, and here we are . . . but better late than never,” Erica A. Hart, a member of the Casting Society’s board of directors, told CBC News. Some of the people up above don’t see us as a craft, let alone a craft that is [deserving] of the Oscar.
The cherry on top
Long-term improvement to industry culture involves thinking critically about the importance of leadership and teamwork, Goodman says. Part of this involves not underestimating certain team members.
When you go back and look at what helps that team perform really well, it turns out that even though the project manager may not have made material contributions to the final work product, without their participation and engagementand, frankly, orchestrationthe team never would have hit the milestones that it needed to hit, he says.
Haga is hopeful the conversations about casting that started this year with the awards introduction continue to bring attention to the work. Kaufman has workd with people she says are receptive to her input and others who take credit for it. She calls the recognition the cherry on top.
I’m a mother, so I need to make sure my kids know you don’t do something just to [be recognized]; you do it because it’s the best thing to do, Kaufman says.
But with the Oscar now accepting casting directors in a different way, I’ll be curious to know how our lives change now that we’re being recognized, she adds. So, we can call you in a year and tell you how it’s looking.
The Oscars arent done adding new categories for recognition, either: in 2028, at the 100th annual ceremony, a Best Stunt Design award will debut. Inside the industry, perception on casting directors has shifted over the years, but having an award might just help nonindustry people understand the level of work it takes to cast a film.
My grandma, for example, is paying more attention to it now. That could be a combination of because I’m working in it and also because there’s an Oscar for it now, casting intern Hemphill says. But I do think that it will bring more attention to casting in general.
Unless you spend your time in boardrooms and C-suites, theres a decent chance youve never heard of the Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG). Theres also a better than decent chance youve encountered its influence. Every year the consulting firm publishes a massive tech trends report that maps emerging threats, white spaces, and opportunities early enough for companies to act on them. Past editions have flagged shifts around synthetic media, digital humans, and generative AI before they entered the mainstream conversation. And some major institutions are clearly paying attention: FTSGs client list includes Mastercard, Ford, and NASA.
Which makes whats happening onstage inside a Hilton hotel in downtown Austin quite jarring. Clad in a black cloak, FTSG founder and CEO Amy Webb opens her SXSW talk with a mock funeral for the trend report. Somber music fills the ballroom while a slideshow plays behind her.
We are gathered here today to celebrate and remember the life of the trend report, Webb told the rhapsodic crowd of roughly 1,500.
She wasnt kidding: An anthropomorphic cartoon version of the report appeared first in a hospital delivery room, then at school, then sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower, before eventually arriving where it spent most of its life: the corporate boardroom.
In an interview with Fast Company ahead of the talk, Webb is characteristically blunt about the spectacle. As long as we’re killing the thing we’re famous for, why don’t we have some fun with it?
The issue, she says, is the format itself. An annual trend report captures only a fleeting moment in a landscape now shifting too quickly to summarize once a year. By the time a massive PDF lands in executives inboxes, parts of it are already outdated.
The challenge with that static report is its a snapshot of a moment in time, Webb says. The bottom line is, things are changing incredibly fast.
Instead of cataloging trends, Webb now wants companies to focus on what happens when several of them collide. In this years analysis, the most consequential shifts in technology arrive in clusters: AI, energy infrastructure, robotics, biotechnology, and geopolitical competition are smashing together in ways that reshape entire systems. These so-called convergences, the report argues, create structural changes businesses often recognize too late.
As Webb put it onstage at SXSW, trends are only the signals. Trend tells you whats changing,” she explained to the crowd. “A convergence tells you whats going to become inevitable.
Her framework borrows from meteorology. If trends are individual weather data points, Webb told the SXSW audience, convergences are the storm systems that form when those forces collide. Companies that want to prepare for the future, she argues, need something closer to a storm tracker than a static report.
The report outlines several areas where those convergences are already taking shape. One example is what Webb calls the agentic economy. AI systems are getting better at planning and carrying out tasks on their own, which could push the internet away from todays model of search and browsing and toward one built on delegation. Instead of hunting for the best deal or managing subscriptions themselves, people might rely on digital agents to do it automatically. In that world, the companies running those agentsand the infrastructure behind themcould become the new gatekeepers of economic life.
Automation, Webb argues, may not arrive as a sudden wave of layoffs so much as a slow erosion of certain jobs, as hiring freezes, attrition, and software gradually absorb office tasks. At the same time, AI tools are increasingly being framed as companions, advisors, and sources of reassurance, raising questions about what happens when people begin turning to software first when they feel stressed or need guidance.
Onstage at SXSW, Webb warned that this shift could extend far beyond productivity software. AI systems, she suggested, could increasingly position themselves as, say, therapists and dating coaches. (Imagine smart glasses quietly whispering suggestions in your ear during a romantic dinner.) The risk, then, is that people could become deeply dependent on systems that are ultimately built and governed by profit-driven tech giants.
As empowering as that may feel, Webb tells Fast Company, the tradeoff is that you are relinquishing a lot of the agency and decision making capabilities that you had to a system where you dont know why the system is making those decisions.
Theres plenty more packed into the reports 157 pages, from polycomputea future where classical, AI, quantum, and biological computing systems operate side by sideto the rise of human augmentation technologies that blur the line between health care and performance optimization. But many of Webbs warnings revolve around a simpler problem: companies often see these shifts coming and still struggle to act.
There are two guiding principles in just about every company right now, Webb says. Those two guiding principles are fear and FOMO.
Back in the ballroom, the theatrical funeral quickly gave way to something closer to a rally. After the eulogy, Webb implored the audience to stand. Moments later, a University of TexasAustin marching band snaked through the aisles, horns blaring as it marched toward the stage. The room erupted. Attendees laughed, cheered, and raised their phones as Webb pivoted from satire to sermon.
Her message, beneath the spectacle, was about so-called creative destruction. Capitalism is like a perpetual storm, Webb told the crowd. To survive the storm you have to recognize that entirely new technologies can make you irrelevant overnight.
Webb also used the stage to lob a few criticisms at the AI industry itself. She singled out OpenAI for what she described as inconsistent messaging around surveillance and its Pentagon partnership. Pick a lane, Sam, she said, referring to CEO Sam Altman.
But both onstage and in her conversation with Fast Company, Webbs larger warning was about where the technology ecosystem itself is heading. The next internet is being built not for people, she says. Its being built for machines.
Never in human history has there been a greater concentration of wealth than in Silicon Valley. The three most valuable corporations in the world have their headquarters in the region, within a few miles of one another, in addition to many other unfathomably wealthy people and companies.
It would logically follow that such a place would have some of the worlds finest architecture, as weve seen in previous centers of economic power. Think: Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, Venice in the Renaissance, New York and Chicago in the early 20th century.
But no, Silicon Valley looks like just about any other American suburb (with a few notable exceptions). The future is invented in boxy office parks shielded from the street by hedges and parking lots. Tourists who come to see the global epicenter of innovation inevitably leave disappointed.
Cupertino, CA. [Photo: Wangkun Jia/Adobe Stock]
This disconnect periodically causes a stir on social media. Matthew Yglesias captured the mood of a recent round of X discourse, posting, The tech industry would be so much cooler if it built iconic skyscraper headquarters instead of this lame office park bullshit.
How did Silicon Valley end up like this? Its partially the story of a place that came into its own in the mid-to-late 20th century, a time when sprawl was the overriding mandate of American urban planning. But there are actually more particular reasons for Silicon Valleys architectural identity, rooted in the tech industrys history and ideology.
Stanford Research Park (then called Stanford Industrial Park), 1955. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University]
Research Park inc.
In 1953, Stanford University and the city of Palo Alto opened a new joint development about a mile from campus called Stanford Industrial Park. The university marketed the complex as a hub for smokeless industry, where university affiliates could commercialize their cutting-edge research. It was immediately an enormous success, incubating Silicon Valley giants like Varian Associates and Hewlett-Packard, and later, Meta and Tesla.
The first building in Stanford Research Park, Varian Associates, 1953. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University]
Stanford Research Park, as it’s now known, is a fairly ordinary-looking office park to contemporary eyes. But at the time of its construction, there was nothing like it in the world. Its design reflected its identity as a fusion of the university, the factory, and the corporate office, Louise Mozingo writes in the book Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes.
Stanford Research Park employed modernist architectural principles dictating the arrangement and spacing of buildings. The office parks developers were required to leave more than half of the land area as open space, and to establish 90-foot landscaped buffers separating buildings from surrounding streets, much like the rules governing tower-in-the-green-style housing projects going up in central cities.
Stanford Research Parks zoning rules were based on earlier policies enacted by the neighboring city of Menlo Park in its Administrative, Professional, Executive, and Research zone in 1948. This was the ur-code for office park zoning, mandating strictly limited lot coverage, large lot sizes, generous parking requirements, and banning noxious industrial processes. Silicon Valley may have pioneered the economic and regulatory frameworks for office park development across the U.S., but it did so with a local flavor.
Varian Associates main entrance, 1953. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University]
Unlike the corporate estates that companies like General Motors and Bell Labs were building concurrently east of the Mississippi, early Silicon Valley office campuses lacked fancy executive wings. At Hewlett-Packards Stanford Research Park offices, open, non-hierarchical floorplans enabled executives to practice management by walking around. Facebook (now Meta) would follow the same principles in its early years, situating C-suite brass among mid-level associates, as depicted in The Social Network. This layout is meant to stimulate creative thinking by creating chance encounters between workers from different departments.
Silicon Valley firms also had a special proclivity for utilitarian architecture. While blue chip industrial giantsbuilt palatial, starchitect-designed campusesthink of Bell Labs reflective obsidian block featured on Severanceto signal their power and permanence, rising Silicon Valley firms had more low-key taste. This has, at times, been ascribed to the poor design sensibilities of the nerdy engineers who ran these firms. Why waste money on expensive frills when the firm is ruthlessly focused on innovation and growth?
But a disinterest in architecture may have reflected deeper priorities. In an essay called, The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright notes that the buildings of the area have remained resolutely bland, superficial, and ephemeral. This may in fact signal not mere cheapness but also an alternative aesthetic, as yet unarticulated: a self-conscious aversion to architectural representations of hierarchy, stability, and technological permanence.
Working at the frontiers of technology and economic transformation, Silicon Valley companies needed highly adaptable workplaces. Venture capital infusions could necessitate rapid upscaling; market crashes meant rapid downscaling. Companies that had disrupted existing industries were wary of their own disruption, and made workplace decisions accordingly.
Silicon Valley is littered with hermit crab shellsold office parks that have housed multiple generations of next big things. Alphabets Mountain View headquarters was built for Silicon Graphics. Metas Menlo Park campus was once home to Sun Microsystems.
Apple Park [Photo: Zenstratus/Adobe Stock]
Future aesthetic
As the current crop of Silicon Valley titans have grown into trillion-dollar businesses, their corporate architecture has evolved to reflect their wealth, power, and, its hoped, permanence. Apple Park, a perfectly circular ring designed by Lord Norman Foster in consultation with Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, is a blast from the future, successfully delivering on its promise to translate Apples product design aesthetic into architecture.
Meta Menlo Park [Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency]
Not to be outdone, Meta and Alphabet subsequently brought on Frank Gehry and Bjarke Ingalls to design portions of their campuses. Next up is Nvidia, which hired Gensler to create a pair of canopied mega-structures sheltering multiple interior office blocks at its rapidly expanding Santa Clara campus.
Thanks to these projects, Silicon Valley is gaining an architectural identity. But it remains a private, primarily virtual architecture. Silicon Valleys architectural achievements are canceled out by its urbanistic deficiencies. Besides the employees and business partners who are permitted on campus, few others will regularly see these buildings in person, and virtually none will regularly see them on foot. They are mainly designed to be viewed from the middle distance in photos and videos, offering a glitzy visual shorthand for the companies that call them home.
Nvidia Headquarters [Photo: PhotoSpirit/Adobe Stock]
Unlike a downtown office tower, these campuses will never be experienced by masses of passerby. They will never be civic landmarks in the way of the Transamerica Pyramid or the Chrysler Building. Theyre all on their own, not characters in a vibrant urban scene. If Apple ever goes the way of Chrysler, or Nvidia pulls a Transamerica, their campuses will become hermit crab shells themselvesbig, weird hermit crab shells.
Entertainment in 2026 is a bit of a double-edged sword. Excellent films and television shows are widely available in ways that would have sounded like science fiction just 20 years agobut at a steep price. A single movie ticket costs an average of $16, while the average American household spends over $42 per month on streaming services, which adds up to $504 per year.
And if youre anything like me, you may not even be getting your moneys worth on those streaming services. Often when I sit down to watch something, I scroll through the options on Netflix, only to go to bed an hour later without having watched anything.
In many cases, that decision paralysis reflects my desire to recreate the feeling of watching something I loved, which is impossible. (What do you mean theres no show or movie that will give me the same emotions I felt watching Outlander for the first time?)
However, there is an easy and free solution to this entertainment conundrum: your local library.
Your library card will help you access books, ebooks, DVDs, audiobooks, and other media that can help you get your entertainment on for freeand can offer you similar stories to the movies and television shows that have captured your imagination.
If youre looking to lower your entertainment costs, here are some recommendations for what to pick up at your local library.
If you loved Sinners
With sixteen Oscar nominationsthe most in Academy Award historyRyan Cooglers Jim Crow-era horror film offers some insightful allegories of racism and cultural appropriation within a tense and emotional vampire flick.
If youd like more vampire lore or gore with a side of cultural commentary, you might check these out from your library:
My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due: Originally published in 1997, this is the first book in Dues African Immortals four-part series. When Jessica, an African-American journalist for the Miami Herald, marries David, her Mr. Perfect, she has no idea he is actually a 450-year-old immortal who traded his soul for unending life. Initially, she shrugs off warning signs, such as the fact that he seems strangely youthful and his injuries heal too quickly, but David eventually tells her the truth when his immortal brothers come to retrieve him. When the people around Jessica start dying violently, David plans to make her and their daughter immortal, whether they want it or not.
Fledgling by Octavia Butler: Butlers final novel before her death in 2006, Fledgling tells the story of Shori, a girl with amnesia who discovers that she is in fact a 53-year-old genetically modified vampire. Despite her memory loss, she must work to discover who has made her what she is and find a way to save herself and those she cares for.
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland: Rather than vampires, Irelands 2018 YA novel imagines that zombies began walking the battlefields of Gettysburg during the Civil War. Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead rose, and as a Black child, she is required to attend a combat school to learn how to protect the living from the walking dead.
Get Out, Us, and Nope, directed by Jordan Peele: Ryan Coogler specifically credited Jordan Peele as one of the filmmakers who influenced his work on Sinners. While none of Peeles three masterpieces specifically deal with vampires or other traditional monsters, each one does look at horror tropes through the lens of race and culture similar to how Coogler does in Sinners.
If youve lost count of your Heated Rivalry reheats
The global phenomenon written and directed by Jacob Tierney and based on the bestselling book series by Rachel Reid has made it clear that romance is not dead, although it does involve more ginger ale, loon calls, and concussions than anticipated.
If you havent already read the entire Game Changers series (and you may have had trouble getting copies at your local library), Reid has also written two standalone novels, Time to Shine and The Shots You Take. But there is a long and storied history of queer sports romance that you can check out from your local library while waiting for season two of Heated Rivalry and book seven of Game Changers:
Gravity by Tal Bauer: This friends-to-lovers hockey romance finds self-proclaimed middle-of-the-road player Hunter Lacey starstruck when he meets his hero, 26-year-old Bryce Michel at the All Star Game. But the two men have instant chemistry on and off the ice. If you like your hockey romance to feature plenty of time on the ice, this is the book for you.
Wake Up, Nat & Darcy by Kate Cochrane: In this second-chance hockey romance, Darcy LaCroix and Natalie Carpenter were once college teammates, friends, and lovers. But that was years ago, before Darcy broke Nats heart and they became bitter rivals. After being cut from the U.S. womens hockey team, Nat takes a guest hosting gig on Wake Up, USAs winter games coveragewith Darcy as her co-host. The snark and banter between Nat and Darcy is reminiscent of the playful and sometimes biting chirps shared between Shane and Ilya in Heated Rivalry
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Heres the annual U.S. household income needed to purchase the typical valued U.S. home:
January 2020: $52,041
January 2021: $52,087
January 2022: $63,111
January 2023: $87,092
January 2024: $93,227
January 2025: $98,900
January 2026: $93,061
While the income needed to buy the median-priced U.S. home is +78.8% higher than it was in January 2020, its down -5.9% year over year.
Methodology: This Zillow calculation is conservative and assumes a 20% down payment and that the homebuyer spends less than 30% of their monthly income on the total monthly payment. This is a financed purchase, of course. For typical home value, Zillow economists used the latest Zillow Home Value Index reading.
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Regional housing markets that have experienced outright home price corrections since the end of the pandemic housing boom have seen faster affordability improvements. That said, many of those placeslike the Austin, Texas, metro areaalso experienced greater home price overheating during the pandemic housing boom.
How did we get here?
During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom. Federal Reserve researchers estimate that new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.
Unlike housing demand, housing supply isnt as elastic and can’t quickly ramp up like that. As a result, the heightened pandemic-era demand drained the market of active inventory and sent national home prices soaring. The typical U.S. home value measured by the Zillow Home Value Index in January 2026 is still a staggering +44.7% greater than in January 2020.
That overheated home price growth, coupled with the ensuing mortgage rate shock, with the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate jumping up from under 3% to over 7%, created the fastest-ever deterioration in housing affordability in 2022. Over the past two years, housing affordability has improved some; however, it still remains challenged.
While the exact hit has varied, this decades affordability squeeze has spread across much of the countryjust look at the two maps below.
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The challenge, of course, is that incomes havent kept up. The gap has narrowed since the end of 2022; however, its still wide.
While the annual U.S. household income needed to purchase a typical U.S. home increased by +78.8% between January 2020 and January 2026, average weekly earnings of U.S. workers have risen by +30.7%, and overall U.S. consumer inflation has grown by +26% during the same period.
Even if you use a calendar app to organize your life, the paper calendar is far from being obsolete.
Write something down on a printed calendar, and it becomes a persistent reminder of important events. You dont have to dig through any screens to write things down, and you dont have to perform any complex sharing maneuvers to set up a communal calendar for family members or colleagues.
But even the paper calendar could benefit from some digital enhancements. With a few minutes of setup, you can print a custom calendar to your exact specifications while also making it small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
A printable, personal, pocketable calendar
To make your own single-page printed calendar, use NeatoCal.
NeatoCal is a free web page that prints out a full-year calendar on a single 11-by-8.5-inch piece of paper.
Printing the basic calendar takes maybe 10 seconds, but you can also spend a few minutes customizing it to your liking.
Calendars are free to print with no sign-ups needed, and the underlying code is open-source.
The default NeatoCal is a 12-month calendar for 2026, with one column for each month and the weekends highlighted in gray. Youre supposed to print it in landscape mode, and theres a little space for writing next to each day.
NeatoCals default 12-month view is clean and simple.
The real power of NeatoCal, however, is in all the ways you can customize it. Visit the project page, and youll see a list of ways to modify the calendar by adding some code to the end of the page address.
For example, lets say you want to print a calendar for 2027. Instead of visiting the main calendar page at this address:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/
. . . youd head to this address:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2027
Or lets say you want to print out a quarterly calendar instead of a full year. For that, we can use some code for specifying three months instead of 12:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3
What happens when you want to print a calendar for Q2? For that, well use some code to offset the start date by a specified number of months:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3&start_month=3
Notice how the above example uses an ampersand (the & symbol) to combine the code for total number of months and the number of months to offset.
With a bit of easy customization, you can make your printed calendar look any way you want.
The full list of URL parameters reveals all kinds of neat possibilities. You can add moon phases, adjust fonts, change the highlight colors, and tweak the abbreviation length for days and months.
Theres even a calendar that highlights alternating weeks instead of weekends:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=hallon-almanackan
My favorite feature of all, though, is the ability to import events from ICS calendar files via this address:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?ics
Want to add events from your Google Calendar? Head to the Google Calendar website, click the vertical ellipses () next to your main calendar, head to Settings and Sharing, then select Export calendar. This will download a ZIP file containing an .ICS file, which you can drag and drop into the page linked above.
If youre feeling especially crafty, you can also use this tool to create an ICS file with one-off or repeating events. Or you can use an AI tool like Claude to turn a list of plain text events into a downloadable ICS file. This is how I was able to create a printable calendar with every Yankee game in 2026:
NeatoCal can even create custom calendars with specific events included.
Once youve designed a calendar to your liking, just hit Ctrl+P or Cmd+P in your browser to bring up the print dialog (or use the Share command to find the Print option from a mobile device), make sure it all fits properly on one page, and start printing. Stick it to your fridge, pin it on your cubicle, or fold it up into your wallet and start enjoying the analog clendar lifestyle again.
NeatoCal works in any web browser, ideally on a device that can send pages to a printer.
The site is free to use with no limits or sign-ins.
The developer says that everything is loaded locally in your own web browser, though as an open-source project, you can also download and self-host your own version.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
This week, Apples newest laptop, the MacBook Neo, went on sale. Reviews of the device have been almost universally positive, with many praising the laptops starting cost of just $599a price point few expected Apple would ever reach for a notebook computer.
Apple is clearly positioning the affordable machine as a productivity device for use in two main areas: education and the workplace. Indeed, imagery on the MacBook Neos product page features many of the most essential productivity apps used by students and workers, including Microsoft Word and Excel, Slack, Canva, Box, Keynote, and more.
Yet if youve picked up a Neo for use in work or school, you should know that there are plenty of additional Mac apps that can elevate your productivity. Here are four cool and unexpected ones you should check out to take your MacBook Neo productivity to the next level.
Magnet keeps your workspace organized on the MacBook Neo’s small screen
One reason Apple can keep the price of the Neo so low is that it has the smallest display of any MacBook. At just 13 inches, the Neo has a smaller screen than both the 13.6-inch MacBook Air and 14-inch MacBook Pro. But smaller screen sizes mean that you have less desktop real estate to manage your overlapping windows, so things can get crowded fast.
[Screenshot: Bootcode A.S.]
Enter Magnet. This useful app helps you organize your desktop workspace in a snap. Magnet instantly moves your apps into a tiled pattern of your choice. For example, if you have a web browser, an email client, and a chatbot open, you can quickly arrange them into three neat windows on your screen. Or, you can use Magnet to snap one app to the left half of your screen, while the other two apps each fill one-quarter of the right side. The tiled arrangements are up to you.
Magnet perfectly aligns window sizes with a click, so you dont have to waste time resizing your app windows manually, leaving more time for productivity.
Glide sharpens your reading focus
Small screens like Neo’s can also make it harder to focus on your content, especially when reading long text documents. Sentences in a document or web page can blend together over time, and if we look away for a moment, it might take a few moments to find the sentence we were reading, breaking our concentration.
[Screenshot: Applorium Ltd]
Thats where Glide comes in. The app dims your entire screen except for a narrow band running across its full width. This band functions as a rectangular spotlight that highlights your text and follows your cursor. The idea is to make it hover over the line you’re reading, which helps you focus. It also acts as a helpful visual cue of where you left off in the document when you return to your computer after stepping away.
Perplexity is the AI chatbot Apple Intelligence should have been
Apple markets the MacBook Neo as a great computer for using its Apple Intelligence tools. The problem, though, is that Apple Intelligence is a pretty disappointing AI platform. Everything from its writing to its image generation tools is fairly lackluster compared to other AI options.
[Screenshot: Perplexity AI, Inc.]
But the biggest drawback of Apple Intelligence is that you cant use it like most people are accustomed to using AI: in a chatbot format. Sure, you can ask Apple Intelligence questions via voice or text, but the platform doesnt provide a history of your conversations, and the answers it gives, frankly, arent very good.
Thats why Neo owners should download the Perplexity app. This is the chatbot Apple didnt include with the Neo. Its also notably better than competitors like ChatGPT at research tasks, such as the kind you do for school or work, because it cites where it found the answers it provides to you.
Soulver 3 is the calculator for people who prefer words over math
In both work and school, we often perform tasks that involve calculations. The new MacBook Neo has a Calculator app, but its quite basic. It also relies on your knowing the correct formulas to get accurate answers. If you don’t know how to formulate the equation for, say, the price of a $3,500 widget order after a 17% discount is applied, the standard Calculator app is useless anyway.
[Screenshot: Acqualia Software]
If you struggle with formatting equations, Soulver 3 is a game-changer. The app is part notepad, part calculator, which allows you to input equations using natural language prompts. For example, with the scenario above, it doesnt matter if I dont know the exact formula for calculating a percentage discount. I can simply type 17% off $3,500 into Soulver 3, and it will return the answer ($2,905.00).
Even in an era of artificial intelligence, Soulver 3 is one of the most useful apps your Neo can offer, since LLM chatbots remain pretty bad at performing math computations.
