Why this newsletter matters

Grand technology shapes our lives more than ever

Thank you for 100 subscribers! I’m truly grateful you’re this early in the journey. This piece announces the early direction for my newsletter: exploring how grand technologies shape our daily lives. I’ll explain what that means, why it matters now, and what motivates me to write about it.

Speaking of email, maybe you’ve heard of “Inbox Zero”: keeping the inbox entirely empty by deleting, responding, or flagging any inbound message. You’ll never miss anything, make faster decisions, and set better work-life boundaries.

But have you heard of—I don’t even know what to call this—Message Zero? Imagine this. It’s my friend’s phone. Watch them open their Messages App… and it’s completely blank?

Jump. Scare.

No no, they are not hiding 3 families. I asked around. They are genuine and kind-hearted— but also a strict digital minimalist, someone deeply protective of their time and cognizant of how their phone kills time.¹²

Powerful technology has engrained itself more than ever into our daily lives.

All of us (at one point or another) (The Lourve)

The world’s largest companies weren’t always making technology, but now they are tech companies driving digital innovation. Warping politics and entire economies to their will, the trillions of dollars affect billions of people to raise millions of questions: Does social media help relationships? Do online marketplaces make for healthier buying habits? How online can or should we be? Can learning about everything mean we should?

Art Quota! My favorite painting at the Met last week — Claude-Joseph Vernet’s The Outer Harbor of Brest (1774). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This newsletter will assess the grand technologies influencing our daily lives.

While the horizon of strategy is bounded by the war, grand strategy looks beyond the war to the subsequent peace. - Liddell Heart³

What are grand technologies? For now, it’s the tech that arrives and stays in our lives to shape them for decades afterwards.

I’m concerned with the technology that sets into our lives once the waves of capital and marketing have washed over. The internet survived the Dotcom bubble; all that infrastructure spent on the fiber is now finally seeing use to support demand for AI computing… but it took decades.⁴

Who commands grand technologies? Powerful companies led by executives strategizing on long visions able to shape geopolitics and command entire economies. They form the spine behind war efforts and entire industries.⁵ Where they trade and build factories directly influences how we assess the state of U.S.-China competition.⁶⁷⁸ At Davos, world leaders angered executives when they arrived late.⁹

Get a little muddy, be a pig in the playpen

Source: MrBille, 2009

2026 looks like a wrestling match between large technology firms planning to spend a filthy amount. The WSJ’s dropped a pregame report last week: “Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet plan to spend $670 billion to build out AI infrastructure this year alone”.

Source: WSJ, "AI Spending: Tech Companies Compared" (Feb 7, 2026) — $670B figure

Like the railroads and the Louisiana Purchase, these spending decisions impact politics, the economy, and the products in society. Downstream, they shape us: the politics of our own relationships, what we can afford, and what information steers our thoughts. I will write about it, but it’s hard to grasp why it matters when I’m hungry and need to make myself some dinner. Our world starts with life in front of us first. We can think universally but must eat act locally.¹⁰

Why does it matter now?

New consumer technology spreads faster than ever before. Few people want to avoid it all by living alone in a cabin; most are being forced to adopt or adapt to new technologies impacting their daily lives.¹¹

Source: Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, April 2012

After 2005, each digital invention—mobile computing, social media, cloud computing, and now with GenAI— all found took quicker to markets than the inventions above. ChatGPT reached 100 million active users in two months. That’s probably the fastest-adopted consumer product in all of human history.¹²

This newsletter will assess what to care about for the sake of our health and wealth— or honestly not, as is the case with Bitcoin.¹³ Modern employers see a failure to use LLMs as unacceptable. Staying out of social media is difficult. You’re probably among the 3.56 BILLION daily people using a product made by Meta, staffed with teams of PhD psychologists casino-ing your thoughts.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸ Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud power over half of all cloud computing.¹⁹ Google DeepMind’s spin-off Isomorphic Labs solves protein folding and is now preparing to support clinical trials to create new drugs. ²⁰

Hyped Future, Chaotic Present, Real History

Recreating cognition at scale is the latest innovation emerging from these powerful companies. A few thousand number of researchers are developing tools for billions of people that automate mundane tasks, personalize digital experiences, and change how to think.²¹²² Lots of hype surrounds what’s supposedly coming. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei warns it’s “a whole country of geniuses housed in a data center” with the brainpower of 50 million Nobel laureates.²³

What could the future look like?

• Could we all get our own personal executive assistant? Concierge-ing everything for everyone.

• Will cars finally drive themselves? Renting out your unused car and ridesharing everywhere threatens the core value of car ownership for millions.

• Could you be the first person to create a billion-dollar company alone? That sounds miserable, but it’s possible.

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  In the moment, It’s obvious people will be doing a lot more with a lot less.

  

Source: Financial Times, Adam Tooze Chartbook, Feb 12

But, how does this affect our daily lives? I believe we should be using it. But, even amidst productivity gains, the technology is far from perfect. Becoming “AI-enabled” could mean you have your own chatbot on your website. It *might* work. It might even give your customers steep discounts!

Source: /r/LegalAdviceUK, Feb 6 2026

Lots of work to improve AI remains. This February, the 2026 International Annual AI Safety Report²⁴ pulled together over 100 AI experts across fields to say what everyone experiences:

1. Alignment problems plague agents. That’s what happens when the spirit of my intentions and instructions fail to correctly boss the AI around. Imagine telling some stupid BurgetBot to “hold the onions” on your Cheeseburger and they literally just sit there holding a bag of onions. Meanwhile, that poor burger burns on the grill. Thanks. (Most people are worry less about burgers and more how systems managing national security could pose an existential threat to humanity here).²⁵

   

   Source: Helen Toner, Taking Jaggedness Seriously

2. Abilities also “jag”²⁶ along the frontier: they can do wild hard tasks but still struggle with easier tasks in other domains.

3. Systems still fabricate data, produce flawed code, and give misleading advice. We’ve all been there. It told me this article was finished three days ago.

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History can ground the hype today even further. Plenty of promising inventions lose their steam before widespread adoption. The running joke is that nuclear fusion has been 30 years away since the 1950s. Other innovations that have improved our lives have backslid. The WHO is warning antibiotics might be losing their effectiveness.²⁷ Today, self-driving cars struggle with “edge cases”: learning how to handle the wild lotteries of moose playing chicken on a mountain road. Some say AGI is already here, others say it’s decades away, and many are still asking for a common definition. Today’s reality does not look like the science fiction we fantasize about… yet?

Why are you doing this?

I love learning and creating for others. Restarting this newsletter right now makes the most sense to continue that path.

that he is most powerful who has power over himself.

— Seneca, Epistles, Moral Letters to Lucillus, Letter 90, Line 34

But through writing? Writing is thinking.²⁸ It helps me process the world. Drafting, researching, writing, and publishing is a cycle that forces deep and honest judgment to the thoughts we examine.²⁹ Every time I publish, I reassess and look for progress in every stage. That internal growth is one I hope to spread with others: family, friends, academics, writers, investors, and inventors.

Balancing authenticity with audience expectations is gonna be a battle for this Bessy. Tone should support the quality of the analysis, but if no one enjoys reading the work, what value do I provide others with my writing?

Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
- Faust, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Part I 

My writing walks the playful tightrope of tone. Anything online must maintain professionalism that doesn’t throw off the analysis—or chances of a career— into a freefall. Lean too far into caution and I hit context collapse: where holding the tension of multiple audiences mellows out voice and lobotomizes the opportunity for incisive insights.³⁰ But lean too far the other way— job? Max, don’t turn into some online pariah that prevents other opportunities. I own a suit that this rude Italian butcher once told me fits well. So I have to believe I can at least look the part. For him. Smart people figure things out; and it’s probably stupid to rely on writing to do so.

Source: Shri Guru Gita, verse 125. From Nectar of Chanting, published by SYDA Foundation (South Fallsburg, NY: SYDA Foundation, 1983)

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Thank you for reading!

I look forward to narrating wider historical trends, recapping events, and profiling founders. Please reach out for topic suggestions, partnering on a piece, or opportunities in this space. I can’t wait to grow my portfolio.

1. Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Portfolio, 2019) https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Minimalism-Choosing-Focused-Noisy/dp/0525536515

2. Katherine Martinko, "What is Digital Minimalism?" (Substack)

3. How long will you wait for what? , Max Bessler, Substack

4. Marketplace, “Infrastructure Lessons from the Dot-Com Bubble”.

5. See the “Age of Personalization” Thesis here from the Maveron team. Everyone is calling it something a little different. What 2025 Taught Us About Building in 2026, Maveron, Substack

6. International AI Safety Report, "International AI Safety Report 2026" https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/publication/international-ai-safety-report-2026

7. WHO, “WHO warns of widespread resistance to common antibiotics worldwide” (October 13, 2025) https://www.who.int/news/item/13-10-2025-who-warns-of-widespread-resistance-to-common-antibiotics-worldwide

8. B.H. Liddell Hart, The Decisive Wars of History: A Study in Strategy; London: G.Bell & Sons, 1929, p. 150. This description would be repeated with a few minor word changes in his later, more famous work: B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd Revised edn.; New York: Penguin, 1991, pp. 321-22.

9. Atlantic Council, “Building the Digital Front Line” (In-Depth Research Report) https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/building-the-digital-front-line/

10. Max Bessler - Thinking Universally, Acting Locally (Substack)

11. Scott Tong, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Mariner Books, 2025) https://www.amazon.com/Breakneck-Chinas-Quest-Engineer-Future/dp/1324106034

12. Tae Kim, The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant (W. W. Norton, 2025) https://www.amazon.com/Nvidia-Way-Jensen-Huang-Making/dp/0393881067

13. Alex Karp, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown, 2025) https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Hard-Power-Belief/dp/059372775X

14. WSJ, “Inside Trump’s Private Reception with CEOs in Davos” (2026) https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/inside-trumps-private-reception-with-ceos-in-davos-543ef7d8m

15. Max Bessler – Bitcoin: When Better Technology Isn’t Enough

16. Gurwinder – How Social Media Shortens Your Life (Substack)

17. Meta Investor Relations, “Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results” — 3.56B daily users. https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2026/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2025-Results/default.aspx

18. AP News, “Meta, Instagram, YouTube: Social Media Addiction” (Los Angeles) https://apnews.com/article/meta-instagram-youtube-social-media-addiction-los-angeles-1b409b31438e5ba46e2e8c064229b51a

19. FBI, “Unabomber Cabin” (Historical Artifacts) https://www.fbi.gov/history/artifacts/unabomber-cabin

20. ABC News, “How Internet-Dependent Are We on Tech Giants Like Amazon?”https://abcnews.com/Business/internet-dependent-tech-giants-amazon-experts-weigh/story?id=126719517

21. Fortune Magazine, Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, ‘Country of geniuses in a data center’: Every AI cluster will have the brainpower of 50 million Nobel Prize winners, Anthropic CEO says https://fortune.com/2026/01/27/country-of-geniuses-anthropic-dario-amodei-50-million-nobel-prize-winners/

22. The Decoder, “Google’s AI Drug Discovery Spinoff Isomorphic Labs Claims Major Leap Beyond AlphaFold 3” https://the-decoder.com/googles-ai-drug-discovery-spinoff-isomorphic-labs-claims-major-leap-beyond-alphafold-3/

23. ABC News, “How Internet-Dependent Are We on Tech Giants Like Amazon https://abcnews.com/Business/internet-dependent-tech-giants-amazon-experts-weigh/story?id=126719517

24. The Decoder, “Google’s AI Drug Discovery Spinoff Isomorphic Labs Claims Major Leap Beyond AlphaFold 3” https://the-decoder.com/googles-ai-drug-discovery-spinoff-isomorphic-labs-claims-major-leap-beyond-alphafold-3/

25. Michael Nielsen, "ASI Existential Risk: Reconsidering Alignment as a Goal," LessWrong (2025). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YeQe36XiY4BhrtRh5/asi-existential-risk-reconsidering-alignment-as-a-goal-1

26. Dell’Acqua, Fabrizio and McFowland III, Edward and Mollick, Ethan R. and Lifshitz-Assaf, Hila and Kellogg, Katherine and Rajendran, Saran and Krayer, Lisa and Candelon, François and Lakhani, Karim R., Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality (September 15, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4573321 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4573321

27. Reuters, “ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base - analyst note” (February 1, 2023) https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/

28. James Q, Why Everyone Should Write (Substack)

29. What we control is the process of writing. See Catherine E. De. Vries, You Don’t Need a Writing Routine. You Need a Reason for Writing (Substack)

30. Marwick & boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience” — https://tiara.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Marwick_boyd_TweetHonestly.pdf