Kinference 2025

Two and a half years ago, I came away from Kinference 2023 disappointed that more of my peers weren’t as put off as I was by the current state of tech’s dominant preoccupations. My experience wasn’t much different this time, except that in the intervening years, Web3 enthusiasm has fashionably given way to AI enthusiasm. This isn’t to say all the speakers were doing PR for LLMs, and among those intermittently expressing guarded misgivings, Frank Chimero reliably gave the issue the most thoughtful framing, with Spirited Away, among other things, as a guide. But otherwise most of the discussion, when not outright optimistic, expressed resignation at best, as if being “left behind” would be worse than submitting to the whims of a bunch of oligarchic sociopaths who are oblivious to the dystopian subtext in their favorite science fiction.

There were assertions that AI is not a replacement for a human while simultaneously marveling at how it allows you to bootstrap your startup with barely any headcount. There was a lot of talk of product, presumed to be inextricably synonymous with commodity, with little talk of what it means to produce. A little compulsory hand-waving about unethically sourced training data. Maybe a sideways glance at the desecration of fact and the web being turned into a wasteland. Not much acknowledgement that this stuff doesn’t exist in a socioeconomic vacuum. No discussion of data centers exponentially overtaking the landscape, destroying communities, and gobbling up cosmically obscene amounts of natural resources. Not one utterance of the word “bubble.” No realistic cost/benefit analysis of this supposedly inevitable future, or consideration of whether its promised convenience is worth renouncing in favor of standing against its harms.

It’s also worth mentioning that I spoke to multiple attendees from overseas who were concerned their travel might be complicated by their perceptibly anti-Trump statements, public or private. Overreaction or not, it’s a recent phenomenon for good reason, and one of little apparent concern to the billionaires shaping AI, who are only too happy to suck up to an authoritarian administration and invite extortion upon themselves to avoid even the mildest government regulation.

My favorite Kinference moments, as in my favorite moments at its predecessor, Brooklyn Beta, were the ones where people spoke excitedly about making—not prompting a robot to blindly cobble together—things they love. Jonnie Hallman’s energetic story of how he came to quit his job to develop an app for organizing local sports meetups was the highlight, and it left me eager to get home and get to work on my own community-oriented site I’ve been thinking about for months. More of this, please!