M2 Issue 203 – Editor’s Letter
A few years ago, I was part of a writer’s room for a TV series called NEW AMERICA. The premise? The American public had had enough of politics-as-usual. So, they wrote in their own President: a washed-up 90s rapper. As President, he set out to shake up the system, only to be blocked at every turn by the Constitution and the powers that be. Finally, fed up with it all, he went on live television, smashed the display case holding the U.S. Constitution, and declared America was starting over.
At the time, we thought we were writing the most nonsensical political fiction imaginable. Today, I wonder if we undershot it.
The real world has suddenly become juicy fodder for weird plotlines that wouldn’t feel out of place in a fictional series. Silicon Valley’s radical ideological pendulum shift; Mark Zuckerberg’s embracing his masculinity; Elon Musk injecting his style of efficiency to the federal government and Sam Altman’s OpenAI, built on open-source ideals, but as closed as a closed thing getting usurped by China’s DeepSeek which shows up with an open-source AI model designed to run more efficiently because of trade restrictions that limited NVIDIA chips. This unleashes a flurry of accusations about how DeepSeek really did it – including from Sam Altman, who accused them of stealing OpenAI’s data. A beautiful irony, given OpenAI took ours in the first place.
I know this is not a US magazine, but what happens there still impacts us in New Zealand. I also tried to write an editor’s letter around the David Seymour and Guy Williams interaction at Waitangi but I didn’t really have anywhere to go with it.
Despite all the craziness, this is still the greatest time in history to be alive. We’re on an exponential trajectory of innovation, and I don’t mean this in a dystopian sense. AI is revolutionising industries far beyond chatbots and automation. It’s feeding new drug discovery, detecting diseases earlier, and reducing manual, repetitive tasks so we can focus on what truly matters, like staying up to date with TikTok. There are also amazing industrial design and engineering leaps. Look at SailGP and their aerospace-inspired hydrofoiling yachts, literally flying above the water at ridiculous speeds, powered by data and cutting-edge design and awesome new manufacturing techniques.
And yet, in the middle of all this future-forward innovation, we still have the best of the old world too. There’s something reassuring about the fact that no matter how fast tech evolves, we will always have 18-year-old single malt whiskey.
So, yes, we are in a crazy time. But it’s also a time of incredible possibility.