It’s hard for me to pass by a thrift store, or a garage sale, or a Little Free Library, without stopping. Yes, the big boxy Barnes & Noble had a hundred times more books than the weird set of bookshelves at the Goodwill behind women’s shoes, but at the Goodwill you could grab five or ten just to try them out. Lousy sci-fi or poetry anthologies—didn’t matter. Buy an old encyclopedia volume for a half dollar, and turn it into postcards.

The music selection is often equally bananas. I once bought a Kraftwerk album for a quarter in Philadelphia alongside a ventriloquism-training album that was just the words of the dummy and a script, so that you could read the jokes with a puppet and the record would talk back; I loved both. In an upstate record store, I found a vinyl LP amongst the “Sing Along with Mitch” LPs, and when I got it home a letter fell out, postmarked Guam. “We’re doing the best we can here,” said the letter, “but there just aren’t any swingers.”

The strange mugs and bad art, the hideous $5 suits to wear to parties—I offer that the best secondhand shops are in Albuquerque and sometimes I dream of returning, just to visit them.

Thrift stores are also a great way to learn about the world, at the very end of the supply chain. These things were going to get thrown away; half the previous owners are dead. It’s usually being sold to fund charity organizations. It’s no longer a product—it’s just stuff. The marketers, strategists, and branding experts are all focused elsewhere. 

Yet you can furnish an apartment, stock a library, buy a cheap telescope, and find some shoes. How many mugs and wineglasses have I owned that are branded for corporate retreats, church fellowships, or golf outings? Trophies for sales quotas. I love all of it. I know not everyone feels this way. In general people like new, clean things that smell good and aren’t haunted. I respect that. But IMO the more haunted the better.

I have always seen the tech industry as a kind of thrift store: A massive, haunted repository of artifacts and ideas, some of which might have value and others of which should probably just be thrown away. 

This is in contrast to the way the tech industry is being portrayed right now, especially around AI: As a giant gleaming space cube that has come to kill us all. What’s weird is that the people who oppose it and the people who advocate for it seem to agree about this. The anti-AI side says it’s going to take all our jobs and ruin culture; the pro-AI side thinks it’s going to escape the lab and control all nuclear weapons, but only after it takes all of our jobs and ruins culture. 

But by the time everything filters down to the nerds on the ground, it’s a huge messy pile of product, and we have to sift through it and figure out where it’s meaningful for us. You can download emulators and run old software, thousands of apps that used to cost $300 each in the early 1990s and are now worthless. Tech is supposed to be a glorious expression of human genius but it’s experienced as a bunch of GitHub repositories and bug reports, and things that don’t work until you learn to edit a plist file. Just a mess.

The new AI systems are actually the most thrift-store-like of all the technologies so far, because they have, often without permission, simply gobbled vast swathes of digital culture and squeezed it into a database that, when queried, produces approximations of what was ingested. 

They’re like thrift stores that generate new thrift stores. You don’t know what you’re going to get, or where it came from, or why it’s there, or if it was donated or stolen. Now it’s sitting on the shelf, a coffee mug that’s unaccountably shaped like an orange. We’ve entered infinite Albuquerque. Billions of dollars are being spent to make it all seem less chaotic, and it’s working, but you ultimately can’t paper over the fact that the source of these models is humans, in all of our biases and dumbness. Chaos.

Given how much we cannot control, as we are reminded when we open a newspaper or social media app—do I have to enumerate the challenges we’re facing, just so you know I’m sincere? You can look for yourself. I find myself taking a breath and remembering that for all people pretend otherwise, actual culture isn’t experienced, or built, along the rules and guidelines that people put forth, whether they’re U.S. Presidents, AI company CEOs, angry social media posters, or college professors. 

Culture—and software is culture—is produced by unruly people without permission, collaging together what they have within reach, trying to bring order and make sense of the randomness of the world on their own terms. The basic refusal of human beings to stick to a plan or follow even the simplest orders is what gives me a sense of gloom today—but also hope for the future. People definitely have plans for us, but we have plans for ourselves. So we’ll see.

The next few years of software are going to be chaotic, messy, and weird. If you prefer things shrinkwrapped with clear instructions, or if you want to plan out a ten-year-career path, it will be frustrating. I personally was hoping for calm. But no. If you can find joy in looking through all the stuff that’s scattered across the shelves and in crates on the floor, searching for weird clues, disturbing artifacts, and new connections (letters from Guam included), it’ll be incredibly interesting. Maybe even rewarding. Or even better—really, really cheap.