They look like ordinary basketball courts. But two new courts built next to public housing in New York City double as flood prevention.
In a sudden flash floodwhen the citys aging sewer system can easily become overwhelmed and streets can fill with waterthe sunken basketball courts act like retention basins. The design can hold as much as 330,000 gallons, with the courts lowest areas filling like a pool and additional water stored in bioretention cells beneath the surface.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
The project becomes like a sponge, which basically holds the water as much as it can, says Runit Chhaya, principal at Grain Collective, a landscape architecture firm that worked on the design with city agencies, local residents, engineers from Hazen and Sawyer, and the urban planning firm Marc Wouters Studios. It helps in not putting stress on the city storm system during a flood event.
[Image: courtesy Grain Collective]
The redesign is part of a larger program that began in 2017, when the New York City Department of Environmental Protection drew inspiration from the way that low-lying cities like Copenhagen were dealing with “cloudbursts” of extreme rain.
Climate change is making heavy storms more likely because warmer air holds more moisture, loading clouds with extra water. Its an even bigger challenge in cities like New York that are covered in pavement and that have combined sewer systems, meaning a single system handles both household sewage and stormwater.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
As the city looked for ways to capture stormwater, public housing sites presented an opportunity. “NYCHA is unique in having large pieces of property within very dense neighborhoods that provide the opportunity to mitigate stormwater overflows in a way that most properties do not,” says Siobhan Watson, vice president of sustainability at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).
There was also an opportunity to improve public space. The design team worked closely with NYCHA residents, emphasizing that the project wasn’t just about climate change. “It’s very hard to go to these communities and just start talking about climate change and flood protection because they are thinking about basic needs and we are talking about infrastructure they didn’t even ask for,” says Chhaya. “So you kind of change the storyand it’s an honest story that, hey, it’s actually a win-win situation. You’re going to get an upgraded amenity.”
At South Jamaica Houses, an apartment complex in a low-lying, flood-prone neighborhood in Queens, the project replaced two older basketball courts with the new sunken design. The courts are now surrounded by steps so spectators can watch a game or casually hang out. The space is also designed to be used for other purposes, like a summer movie night or farmers market.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
During storms, rain from nearby streets is channeled through pipes into bioretention areas beneath the basketball courts. The courts, which are roughly three feet deep, also can hold up to a foot of water in areas and then slowly release it. Most of the stored water seeps underground in the 48 hours after a storm. If the subsurface storage is full, a valve allows the rest of the water to overflow to the sewer only when there’s capacity.
The inspiration came from similar designs in Europe, including a “watersquare” in Rotterdam that functions as public space most of the time but captures water in heavy storms. The projects are an investmentthe first system at South Jamaica Houses cost around $5 millionbut could help prevent more costly damage.
[Photo: courtesy Grain Collective]
When planning first began, the city was thinking about long-term resilience. “At the time, we had not really experienced these kinds of extreme rains that we’ve seen over the past few years,” says Watson. “And over the course of time as this project has been developed, the context has totally changed.” The city has now seen storms like Hurricane Ida, in 2021, where extreme, sudden rain caused severe flooding and killed 11 people living in basement apartments. Ida showed the danger is real and urgent, underscoring the need for projects like the new courts.
Now, New York City is moving forward with more of the infrastructure at other public housing around the city. At a complex called Jefferson Houses, a new playground under construction uses permeable pavers to channel rainwater into underground storage tanks. Another basketball court is set to begin construction at Clinton Houses, and other projects are in the design phase now at four other sites.
Remember earlier this year when everyone on your feed was wearing bizarre shoes, like Maison Margiella’s ballerina flats with split toes and mesh ballet flats? Or when statement scrunchies were all the rage? Don’t feel bad if you missed it. Blink, and the trend was over.
Over the past 15 years, the pace of fashion trends has sped up thanks to social media and fast fashion brands. But over the past five years, with the rise of TikTok and Shein, they’ve gotten out of control. Micro-trends pop up in a subculture of the internet, lasting for just a few days before fading into oblivion.
It’s gotten to the point where many people have lost interest in fashion trends altogether, at least according to Stitch Fix, the personal styling service. Every year, the company culls through the data of its more than two million clients and gathers insights from the personal stylists who serve them, to predict future buying behavior. Two thirds of customers have expressed “trend-fatigue,” and are generally ignoring trends. “People are tired of trying to keep up with what’s in,” says Amy Sullivan, Stitch Fix’s VP of buying and private brands.
This wasn’t always the case. Stitch Fix’s customers aren’t necessarily fashionistas, since they’re keen to outsource their clothes shopping to experts, but they do generally mirror the tastes of the broader American population. Over the past few years, they’ve requested garments that were on trend. After the pandemic, they were keen on “dopamine dressing,” which meant picking colorful, mood-boosting looks. Then, last year, they were into quiet luxury, the understated sophisticated look popularized by the TV show Succession. But this year, nobody seems to knowor carewhether there’s a single, dominant aesthetic.
[Photo: Stitch Fix]
Instead, Sullivan says they’re just requesting classic, versatile staple looks, like black tops and white button-down shirts. To prevent their outfit from getting too boring, they’re asking for statement pieces, like sculptural jewelry or colorful handbags, that add a hit of visual interest. Stitch Fix has surfaced the color “Chili Red” as a hue that will allow customers to add some spice to otherwise very basic looks. “Color is a way to bring neutral staples to life,” says Sullivan. “We’re seeing sales of red pieces go up, but they’re generally adding just a small pop of color to their outfit.”
If you needed another piece of evidence that consumers are over trends, Stitch Fix stylists say that customers are inspired by the style of Jennifer Aniston and Anne Hathaway. These celebrities aren’t exactly known for their cutting-edge fashion: When they’re not on the red carpet, they’re generally wearing classic pieces in neutral colors. “Their style is very accessible,” says Sullivan. “They’re not as fashion-forward as some other celebrities.”
[Photo: Stitch Fix]
Pantone, the color expert, appears to have also recognized that the world is exhausted by the constant churn of trends. For 2026, it has chosen a shade of white called Cloud Dancer for its color of the year. It’s a hue that telegraphs a desire for blankness at a time when “the overstimulation of the internet is only increasing,” as my colleague Mark Wilson writes.
For those of us who care about sustainability, consumers’ exhaustion with trends is an unmitigated good. For the past two decades, as trends have sped up, the industry has churned out more and more clothing.
Brands like Shein produce low-priced, low-quality clothes that are effectively designed to be disposable. This flood of clothing is destroying the planet. Making these garments consumes natural resources and spews carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Most will only be worn a few times before ending up in a landfill.
[Photo: Stitch Fix]
One solution to this environmental catastrophe is for people to buy fewer clothes. A way to get there is for consumers to abandon trends and focus, instead, on purchasing staples when their budget allows. So Stitch Fix’s prediction is encouraging. But will our abstention from trends last? Have we finally entered a post-fashion-trend reality?
Sullivan believes that’s possible. “Everyone is agreed that we want to invest in durable classics as the foundation of our wardrobe,” she says. “It doesn’t seem like we’re ever going back to a time when the fashion industry dictated trends that we all have to follow. And there’s something liberating about that.”
As the Trump administration makes announcement after announcement about its efforts to promote the U.S. fossil fuel industry, the industry isnt exactly jumping at new opportunities.
Some high-profile oil and gas industry leaders and organizations have objected to changes to long-standing government policy positions that give companies firm ground on which to make their plans.
And the financial picture around oil and gas drilling is moving against the Trump administrations hopes. Though politicians may tout new opportunities to drill offshore or in Arctic Alaska, the commercial payoff is not clear and even unlikely.
Having worked in and studied the energy industry for decades, Ive seen a number of discoveries that companies struggled to move forward with because either the discovery was not large enough to be commercially profitable or the geology was too difficult to make development plausible. Market conditions are the prime drivers of U.S. energy investmentnot moves by politicians seeking to seem supportive of the industry.
Market fundamentals trump policy announcements
The general decline in oil prices from 2022 through late 2025 has reduced the attractiveness of many drilling investments.
And opening the East and West coasts to drilling may sound significant, but these regions have unconfirmed reserves. That means a lot of subsurface work, such as seismic surveys, stratigraphic mapping, and reservoir characterizationpotentially taking yearswould need to be done before any drilling would begin.
Offshore drilling also faces enormous opposition.
On the West Coast, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have made forceful statements against any new California offshore oil drilling. They have said any effort is economically unnecessary, environmentally reckless, and dead on arrival politically in the state.
California local governments, environmental groups, business alliances, and coastal communities also oppose drilling and have vowed to use legal and political tools to block them.
There is opposition on the East Coast, too. More than 250 East Coast local governments have passed resolutions against drilling.
Governors on both sides of the aisle, including Democrat Josh Stein of North Carolina and Republicans Brian Kemp of Georgia and Henry McMaster of South Carolina, have spoken out against drilling off their coasts.
Drilling for oil in the Arctic region of Alaska is much more complex than in other areas of the country and the world. [Photo: Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement/Flickr]
Arctic drilling is even harder
Drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Beaufort Sea off Prudhoe Bay in Alaska would be a massive undertaking. These projects require years of development and are subject to future reversals in federal policyjust as Trump has lifted long-standing drilling bans in those areas, at least for now.
In addition, Alaska is one of the most expensive and technically challenging places to drill. Specialized equipment, infrastructure for frozen landscapes, and risk mitigation for extreme weather drive costs far above other regions. These projects also face logistical challenges, such as pipelines running hundreds of miles through remote, icy terrain.
Natural gas from Alaska would likely be sold to Asian buyers, who increasingly have alternative sources of supply from Australia, Canada, Qatar, and even the U.S. Gulf Coast. As production rises in those places, the entrance of Alaskan natural gas into the market raises the risk for global oversupply, which could depress prices and reduce profitability.
Despite political support from the Trump administration, the oil and gas companies would need financing to pay for the drilling. And those loans wont come if the oil companies dont have agreements with buyers for the petroleum products that are produced. Major oil companies have withdrawn rom Alaska and signaled skepticism about attractive long-term returns.
Trump has helped some
In the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, the president has signed at least 13 executive orders pertaining to the energy industry. Most of them focus on streamlining U.S. energy regulation and removing barriers to the development and procurement of domestic energy resources. However, the broad nature of some of these orders may fall short of establishing the stable regulatory environment necessary for the development of capital-intensive energy projects with long time horizons.
Those efforts have reversed the Biden administrations go-slow approach to oil drilling, reducingthough not completely eliminatingthe backlog of requests for onshore and offshore drilling permits that accumulated during Bidens presidency.
Delays in permit approvals increase project costs, risk, and uncertainty. Delays can increase the chances that a project ultimately is downsizedas happened with ConocoPhillips Willow project in Alaskaor canceled altogether. Longer timelines increase financing and carrying costs, because capital is tied up without generating revenue, and developers must pay interest on the debt while waiting for approvals. Delays also lead to higher project costs, eroding project economics and sometimes preventing the project from turning a profit.
Investment follows economics, not politics
Unlike in some countries, such as Saudi Arabias Aramco, Norways Equinor, or Chinas CHN Energy, the U.S. does not have a national oil or gas company. All of the major energy producers in the U.S. are privately owned and answer to shareholders, not the government.
Executive orders or political slogans may set a tone or direction, but they cannot override the fundamental requirement for profitability. Investments cant be mandated by presidential decree: Projects must make economic sense. Without that, whether due to low prices, high costs, uncertain demand, or changing regulations, companies will not proceed.
Even if federal policies open new areas for drilling or relieve some regulatory restrictions, companies will invest only if they see a clear path to profit over the long term.
With most energy investments costing large amounts of money over many years, the industry likely wants a sense of policy stability from the Trump administration. That could include lowering barriers to profitable investments by accelerating the approval process for supporting infrastructure, such as transmission power lines, pipelines, storage capacity, and other logistics, rather than relying on sweeping announcements that lack market traction.
Skip York is a nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Human activity is driving climate change; thats a fact that more than 99.9% of scientific papers agree on.
But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly removed that information from a webpage explaining climate changes causes.
Its yet another move by the Trump administration that downplays climate science. Trump has previously called climate change a hoax, repealed numerous climate laws, and has bolstered the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which are the main cause of rising heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
An EPA page titled Causes of Climate Change once began by directly noting that since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earths climate.
Now, that page begins by stating, Natural processes are always influencing the earths climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. (The previous version of the website is still available via online archives.)
The previous EPA web page above, noting human activity as a cause, and the edited version below. [Screenshots: epa.gov]
A purging of scientifically accurate information
Daniel Swain, a climate and weather scientist at UCLA, noticed the change earlier this week. It began when a weather communications colleague reached out to him about the EPAs Indicators of Climate Change section being offline.
That section wasnt just one web page, but an entire subdomain that included data, maps, and detailed stories on certain climate change indicators like shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels. It was often used by experts, including Swain himself, to grab ready-made info graphics and other resources.
Swain looked into that issue, and found that the link now redirects to a broken web page. Then he started digging into other webpages from the EPA.
It immediately became clear that there had been a much larger scale, essentially, purging of scientifically accurate information from a large portion of the EPA public facing website, he says.
The EPA also removed a sub page on climate change impacts that discussed events like floods and heatwaves. But even more concerning than certain pages disappearing, Swain says, was the change to the causes webpage removing the mention of human activity.
That had been, not removed, but dramatically modified to the point where it is now false, he says.
The move isnt necessarily surprising from the Trump administration, Swain adds. But he calls it a pretty clearly deliberate effort to shift the public facing view on formally authoritative federal agency documents, communications, and websites to align with partisan political priorities.
The previous “Indicators of Climate Change” website, and the new broken link. [Screenshots: epa.gov]
Its not exactly clear when these changes occurred, but the Wayback Machine shows the comments about human activity still on the EPA website in early October.
While nearly all information about human-caused climate change has been scrubbed from the website, one stray reference to it remains, at the end of a section discussing how volcanic eruptions have previously released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Volcanic particles from a single eruption do not produce long-term climate change because they remain in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than greenhouse gases, that section currently reads. In addition, human activities emit more than 100 times as much carbon dioxide as volcanoes each year.
In a statement to the New York Times, a spokesperson for EPA administrator Lee Zeldin noted that the archives still existed, and said that the Trump administration is focused on human health over left-wing political agendas.
This agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult, she added.
(A separate EPA webpage, titled Future of Climate Change, does still point to human causes of global warming.)
Humans have caused more than 100% of climate change
The science on climate change is clear: Human activity is the cause.
In fact, previous climate scientists analyses have found that humans have caused more than 100% of global warming since 1950.
That’s possible because of the fact that earths natural cycles have actually slightly cooled the planet over the last century. Essentially, human causes have not only caused the warming that we’ve seen, but it’s also offset a bit of cooling that otherwise would have occurred, Swain says.
Human caused warming is, for all intents and purposes, the singular cause of contemporary climae change, he adds.
Disinformation and AI confusion
There are other resources for accurate climate information that note human activity as its cause.
But the EPAs move to remove that information points to a broader issue, in which the Trump administration is eroding credibility in government information and its institutions at large. The same thing has played out on the CDC and Health and Human Services websites, specifically concerning vaccines.
To Swain, altering a page on climate change causes shows intent to deceive.
They chose not to delete that page. They heavily modified it to the point of scientific incorrectness, he says. That is choice . . . and it is arguably something that is even more deeply concerning, because it shows a willingness, essentially, to lie, and to present information that is false.
This move from the EPA could also have ricochet effects. Consider AI overviews and LLMs, Swain says. If they re-aggregate these webpages from the EPA, they may also regurgitate those falsehoods.
The algorithm is not capable of differentiating truth from fiction, he says. The challenge is that it is getting more and more difficult to find consistent, reliable, and authoritative sources for this kind of information.
Change is often presented as an enigma. Unlike a traditional management task, you cant just devise a plan and execute it. To be an effective change leader, you need to embrace a certain amount of uncertainty because change, by definition, involves doing new things, and that always involves some measure of unpredictability.
Still, that doesnt mean change is mysterious. We actually know a lot about it. In Diffusion of Innovations, researcher Everett Rogers compiled hundreds of studies performed over many decades. Around the same time, Gene Sharp led a parallel effort to understand how large-scale political movements drive social and institutional change.
So while any change effort involves no small amount of uncertainty, there is also quite a bit of consistency. Much as Tolstoy remarked about families, all successful transformations end up looking very much alike, while all unsuccessful transformations end up failing in their own way. Here are four numbers to keep in mind as you embark on your change journey.
1. Three Quarters Of Transformational Initiatives Fail
In 1983, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal Human Resource Management that described an adoption penalty for firms that didnt adapt to changes in the marketplace quickly enough. His ideas became McKinseys first change management model that it sold to clients.
Yet it was Harvards John Kotter, in his seminal 1996 book Leading Change, who really popularized the idea of change management, bringing it from academic theory into the practical world of business. His eight-step change management process continues to define the field for many even today. Later, Proscis ADKAR model gained prominence.
Yet for all of the prestige surrounding these ideas, theres no evidence that any of these change management methods actually work. In fact, in a 2021 study McKinsey found that 69% of transformation efforts fail. A more recent study by Bain found that only 12% succeeded and 75% had mediocre results. Thats abysmal.
There are many theories about why change fails. The McKinseys report points out that the source of failure can come at any stage, from target setting to planning, implementation, and after. Bain found that nearly all failed transformations were underfunded. In truth, however, these are symptoms, not causes.
In my research Ive found something simpler and more fundamental: change fails because people resist it. If you can overcome resistance, change is possible. If not, it isnt. That is why we developed a simple tool called the Resistance Inventory, so that our clients can anticipate resistance from Day 1 and build strategies to mitigate it.
2. Two-Thirds Of Employees Experience Change Fatigue
Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big kick-off meeting, and look to move fast, gain scale, and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.
Yet trying to manufacture urgency often backfires. In Cultures of Growth, Stanford social psychologist Mary C. Murphy points out that disruption undermines the growth mindset that is essential for building an innovative culture. In particular, she cites research indicating that fear inhibits learning. There is also evidence to suggest that this effect is especially pronounced among top performers, who tend to be more prone to anxiety.
Now consider a 2014 report by PwC. In a survey of more than 2,200 executives, managers, and employees located across the globe, it found that 65% of respondents cited change fatigue, and only about half felt their organization had the capabilities to deliver change successfully.
It gets worse: 44% of employees say they dont understand the change theyre being asked to make and 38% say they dont agree with it. Perhaps not surprisingly, employees view new transformation initiatives suspiciously, taking a wait-and-see attitude, undermining the momentum and leading to a boomerang effect in which early progress is reversed when leadership moves on to other priorities.
The impact on mental health is substantial. Stress disengages the parts of the brain related to cognitive and executive functions and activates the emotional parts of the brain instead. A recent study by the American Psychological Association found that 71% of American workers report feeling stressed at work and three in five say it negatively impacts their performance.
3. Only 10%20% Participation Is Needed To Hit An Inflection Point
The biggest misconception about change is that, to get people to adopt it, you need to sell the value of an alternative future. The real problem with change is that the status quo has inertia on its side, and never yields its power gracefully. It has had yearsor even decadesto build support amng internal and external stakeholders.
Thats why most transformational efforts fail and why two-thirds experience change fatigue. The status quo, despite its drawbacks, is what people know. To adopt something new, we need to overcome the synaptic patterns built up in our brains, the cultural forces to which we have conformed and to overcome switching costs.
Thats never easy. So how do you break the cycle?
The good news is that you dont have to convince everyone at once. We know from the earliest diffusion studies on things like hybrid corn and tetracycline that it takes only 10%20% to adopt an innovation for rapid acceptance by the majority to follow. Everett Rogers, in his seminal Diffusion of Innovations, found that this pattern was consistent over hundreds of studies spanning many decades.
The key is to understand that change doesnt spread through communication campaigns, but through peer networks. If you can empower 10%20% of your organization to be successful with a new idea, they will spread it to their friends, who will spread it to others still. People adopt what they see working around them. So instead of trying to shape opinions, work to shape networks.
4. 84% of U.S. Corporate Assets Are Now Intangible Assets
In the early 1980s, Intels President, Andy Grove, realized he had a problem. The company had built its business on DRAM memory chips. But competition from the Japanese was killing its profits. As he described in his book, Only The Paranoid Survive, things came to head in the middle of 1985.
He turned to Intels Chairman and CEO Gordon Moore and asked him what a hypothetical new CEO would do if they were both fired. Moore replied without hesitation that the new CEO would get us out of memories. It was right then and there that a decision was made to focus on the microprocessors that would lead Intel to industry dominance.
Its a great story and, for many, it has come to epitomize effective change leadership. Leaders make a strategic decision, communicate it effectively, and see that it is implemented at every level of the organization. Questions and concerns are listened to and addressed, but at the same time, the message is clear: Change is coming and you need to get on board.
But consider that research shows in 1975, during roughly the same period that Gove and Moore transformed Intel, 83% of the average US corporations assets were tangible assets, such as factories, machinery, and buildings. When your assets are tangible, change is largely about communicating strategic decisions made from above. Theres little anybody can do to resist them anyway.
However, the very same research finds that by 2015, 84% of corporate assets became intangible, such as licenses, patents, and research. Change is no longer about making decisions about strategic assets, but about influencing what people think and do everyday. You cant try to force or overpower that kind of change, you need to attract and empower.
And that is probably the most important thing to know about how transformations happen today: change itself has changed. We can no longer just tell people to do what we want; we need to attract people who want what we want, who share our sense of mission. It is no longer enough to simply plan and direct action; we must inspire and empower belief.
I want to talk about something that I feel like maybe is a little controversial, content creator Jaclyn Hill said in a video posted earlier this week.
The OG beauty influencer got her start on YouTube well over a decade ago. She’s since grown across different social media channels, including Instagram and TikTok, where she has 8.5 million and 1.2 million followers, respectively.
In the video, which has since racked up over 3.5-million views, she opens up about how she’s been struggling to get views on TikTok and feels like she’s running through mud to connect with her followers. When you have a million followers, but youre getting 30,000 views, this is just not the way it used to be, she said.
She was rightthe video proved controversial. Fans instantly took to the comments to push back at Jaclyn, saying that the influencer was being out of touch. One user commented: Saying Im burnt out from posting Sephora hauls and grwms to employed people is insane.
Another wrote: Babe. That sweatshirt is $140. That’s my entire weekly grocery budget that we can afford for our entire family.
Amid the backlash, an important point has been somewhat lost. Hill was taking issue with low views, a sign that her content is not being shown to those who have chosen to follow her. She was not raising the issue of low engagement, which would have been a sign that her followers were no longer enjoying her content.
Instead, Hill has inadvertently found herself the newest face of a longstanding conversation around influencer fatigue. These feelings have been bubbling for a few years now and every few months resurface in reaction to one viral video or another.
Jacyln, youre rich, and you won, one creator, @daadisnacks, said in response to her video. Im sorry if people dont want to be drowned in overconsumption by influencers when they cant afford groceries or housing.
Fast Company has reached out to Hill for comment.
This sums up the general sentiment online, as internet users are increasingly fed up with inescapable ads and being sold to 24/7. In many cases, people arent buying what influencers are selling, namely luxury items and extravagant lifestyles that feel overwhelmingly out of touch with most Americans reality.
Such conspicuous consumption has grown somewhat distasteful at a time when nearly half of Americans are struggling to afford rent and groceries. Content creators on the whole are an easy target, especially when they are seen to be complaining to the audience that gave them their platform in the first place.
Its worth reiterating, Hills issue was directed at the algorithm not her followersa complaint that has been echoed by other influencers on the platform over the years. As opposed to platforms like Instagram, where users would have to actively follow accounts to see influencer posts in their feeds, TikTok relies on an algorithm that shows users posts on their For You page based on what their behavior suggests they might like.
Let’s say a group of viewers responds positively to a video, either by sharing the video or watching it in full, TikTok then shows it to more people who it thinks share similar interests. That same process then repeats itself, until the video goes ultimately viral.
But if the first group of viewers the video is shown to only watches a few seconds before scrolling on, it is then shown to fewer users, limiting its potential reach.
If viewers are no longer interested in watching overconsumption from influencers, the algorithm will stop pushing it out.
For Hill, she put the question to her followers as to what they want to see instead. Addressing the backlash in a follow up video, she said: My ears are open, Im listening.
On December 11, 2015, OpenAI arrived on the scene with a bang. Announced on the penultimate day of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an academic confab held in Montreals Palais des Congrs by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, the organization had been in the planning for months (an infamous July 2015 meeting at the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel brought on board many of OpenAIs key early staffers).
But when it went public with an announcement and blog post, the community reacted with surprise. This is just absolutely wonderful news, and I really feel like we are watching history in the making, wrote Sebastien Bubeck, then a researcher at Microsoft, and since October 2024, an OpenAI employee. The company was well-funded and professed to have clear goals: to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
Bubeck had little idea how prescient his words were. Even the wildest predictions of its founders on that day in 2015 likely couldnt have imagined how much ChatGPT would change the worldand OpenAIs fortunes. But now that its a decade old, the main question its investors, its employees, and all of us relying on its success to keep the stock market healthy are asking is: Where will it be in another 10-years time?
Ten years ago, OpenAI started with a fairly legitimate scientific question and had a social conscious focus, says Catherine Flick, an AI ethicist at the University of Staffordshire. Flick points out that its founding form was a complicated nonprofit organization that was always going to be difficult to addressand caused plenty of consternation, including the2023 ousting of its CEO, Altman.
But that founding ideal has changed significantly, she says. Now we have a for-profit company that has completely shared any responsibility for social benefit and has basically embraced that growth at all costs kind of mantra, says Flick. The reason? OpenAI is at the vanguard of the generative AI revolution, and theres money to be made.
One key area that is likely to change OpenAI is the advent of superintelligence, a contested idea that the AI systems the company and its competitors are developing will at some point surpass human capabilities in every aspect. Those working closest to the AI models in frontier labs seem convinced of the idea that this will happenbut outsiders question whether thats simply a case of being too close to the Kool-Aid than superior knowledge as a result of seeing behind the scenes.
Nevertheless, those at the top of the company are thinking about the future impact of AI a decade out. Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Altman predicted that by 2035, college graduates if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job. “OpenAI says that with today’s level of understanding, obviously nobody should deploy superintelligencebut also that their top priority is to build this, says Steven Adler, a fellow at the Roots of Progress Institute, who spent nearly four years between 2020 and 2024 at OpenAI, working in its safety research team. Its a concerning combination of beliefs, he adds.
Adler hopes Open AIs plans for the future can remain independent and impartial from its for-profit interestssomething they are required to do Having overlapping membership of the for-profit and not-for-profit boards is a natural conflict, he believes. But more fundamentally, that will be challenging in part because of the competition that the company faces from other AI labs working at the frontier of the technology. “We all need to find ways to stop the AI industry’s race dynamicswhich OpenAI has long warned aboutfrom driving us off a cliff.
Theres still some who think it could drive off that cliff. In 10-years, time, I fully expect OpenAI to have either completely imploded with all of its assets, sold off to some sort of private equity firm or similar, or have been snatched up by some other company and acquired in some way, Flick says.
OpenAIs success will determine the AI industrys future, as well as that of the broader economy. Given its centrality to AI, OpenAIs success or failure and the rate of its process ultimately has major ramifications on the broader consumer internet and AI hyperscaler spaces, Ross Sandler, managing director and senior internet research analyst at Barclays, wrote in a recent research note.
At present,OpenAI is sitting pretty, reckons Sandler, standing around six to 12 months ahead of its competitors in most areasthough the biggest firms like Google are starting to catch up with the release of its latest models like Gemini 3. Barclays estimates that by 2030, its revenue could be $200 billion, up from an estimated $13 billion this year, with around 44% of that coming from ChatGPT.Sandler also points out that OpenAI needs only convert a low single-digit proportion of its users in order to meet its revenue targets at present. That puts it well below other subscription apps, including Tinder, Spotify, and Duolingo.
On one hand, Barclays research suggests that OpenAI is sitting pretty in its position at present. Weve found over the years that once habits are established, its hard for followers to dislodge the leader in a space, wrote Sandler. Yet Sandler also says that Google is the potentially huge spoiler in the midst for the next decade. For now, OpenAI is sitting pretty
Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, surveys the sky from a sunbaked hillside 5 miles from Utahs Great Salt Lake. On this balmy Sunday afternoon in late September, the lake is calm, but its serenity belies a potentially catastrophic problem: The Great Salt Lake is shrinkingand is at risk of disappearing altogether.
At its peak 40 years ago, the lake covered 2,300 square miles; today, more than 800 square miles of lake bed are exposed. As more of the lake dries, scientists warn that dust storms made up of toxic heavy metals could plague the Salt Lake Valley, home to 1.2 million people, and beyond.
Rainmakers futuristic technology could solve the states water woes by harnessing nature. The startup flies drones into the troposphere, where they probe for precipitation-friendly conditions before releasing silver iodide particles that seed rain and snow.
The weather today is too idyllic for umbrellas. But Dorickos mind, as usual, is in the clouds. Theres hella-supercooled liquid water today between six and nine thousand feet, he says. So basically, we gotta start blasting.
With just weeks to go before the start of prime cloud-seeding seasonsilver iodide is more effective in colder temperatures, where it can produce snowa dozen Rainmaker drone operator trainees have assembled on this pasture to log flight time before relocating to the Bear River Basin, which feeds the lake.
As they compare notes, Doricko, in cowboy boots, winds his way between dried cow dung and yellow rabbitbrush to reach his startups signature innovation, resting in the dirt: a custom-built, 3-foot-by-3-foot quadcopter drone dubbed Elijah.
In a small red tent nearby, a drone operator huddles over a laptop that serves as the command center. Elijah isnt registering its coordinates, but after a teammate reorients its antennas, it blinks to life on the laptop screens topographical map. The operator checks for nearby air traffic before configuring a set of instructions.
Were going to take off, he calls out. Start mission. Theres a dull mechanical buzz. A dozen pairs of eyes squint upward as Elijah rises into the blue.
Doricko lights an American Spirit and leans against the pasture fence, brushing his unruly mullet out of his face. He looks the part of frontier hotshot. But in practice, hes trying to impose an unprecedented degree of scientific discipline on an industry that operates like the Wild West.
Cloud seeding, which first emerged in experimental form in the 1940s, has traditionally been conducted by small airplanes that use flares to release particles like silver iodide or salt. Longtime operators attest to cloud seedings benefits, but they have a hard time proving the specific efficacy of each mission.
Rainmaker is betting that its drones will be cheaper to fly and more precise, allowing the company to conduct operations at greater scale and with greater assurance of impact. Doricko has $31 million in venture capital riding on that conviction.
The 25-year-old founded Rainmaker in 2023 after dropping out of UC Berkeley, where he had been studying physics. He won a Thiel Fellowship the next year and now has the backing of investors like Naval Ravikant, Chris Saccas Lowercarbon Capital, and Michael Gibsons 1517 Fund, as well as 120 employees and a growing list of customers, including state governments and farming associations.
Though Rainmaker has piloted its tech across the U.S. and even Argentina, it faces its biggest test this winter: demonstrating that it can reliably use Elijah to generate rain and snow, forestalling disaster at the Great Salt Lake. At the same time, Doricko needs to persuade skeptics that cloud seeding is safe and legitimate.
Surmounting these obstacles is more than a business imperative for Doricko, who quotes the Bible and Elon Musk in the same breath. He was baptized in Texas two days before his twenty-first birthday, after turning away from a hedonistic Berkeley lifestyle that he looks back on with dismay.
Doricko has taken to heart the first chapter of Genesis, in which God blesses humanity, commanding that it replenish the earth, and subdue it, while granting people dominion over the seas, the air, and other living creatures.
My deepest, heartfelt core motivation is to serve God, he says. And I think the best way to do that is to put water on the ground for people and ecosystems and industries in need. While not every member of the Rainmaker team shares his faith, they share his purpose, which he distills as the betterment of our country and the world.
Dorickos outspoken embrace of Christianity, patriotism, and homegrown technology has made him one of the most prominent figures in a movement thats centered in El Segundo, California. Over the past three years, the Los Angeles suburb, known for its connection to the aerospace industry, has become a hub for founders tackling nuclear energy, autonomous defense systems, domestic manufacturing, and moremany with a sense of religious mission.
Peoples work and life has been devoid of meaning and consequence, Doricko opined on a recent podcast, joined by several of his Gundo founder friends. He considers working in crypto, for example, to be dishonorable.
The Gundo bro paragons punctuate their noble work with a good time: Picture iron-pumping, beach bonfires, warehouse parties, and a steady stream of Celsius and Zyn. Reindustrialization and boozin, Doricko has joked of the scene. The areas founders have attracted media attention and the backing of so-called tech right investors like Peter Thiel and Katherine Boyle, who is the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitzs American Dynamism practice.
Doricko, though, has also been tied to more extreme voices on the right. Fast Company uncovered a tweet that he sent in 2020, while still at Berkeley, to white nationalist and far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, requesting to start a student chapter of Fuentess then-nascent organization, America First. Other publications have linked Doricko to a church in Santa Clarita, California thats part of a denomination led by Christian nationalist Doug Wilson.
Doricko says this reporting paints an incomplete portrait of who he is and what he believes. Im not a white nationalist, he says, adding that he didnt know the full extent of Fuentess views in 2020 and that the campus chapter never came together. He has attended the Santa Clarita church less than 10 times in the past, he acknowledges, but today considers an Eastern Orthodox congregation his church home.
At the same time, Doricko has become the target of conspiracy theorists, who accuse Rainmaker of causing the devastating July fourth flooding in Texas. The company had been working in Texas two days prior, but cloud seeding isnt capable of producing anywhere near as much rain as inundated the Guadalupe River.
That hasnt stopped rumors from proliferating online: Doricko and Rainmaker are, at last, proof that shadowy deep state forces control the weather. By mid-September, cloud-seeding bans had been proposed by primarily Republican lawmakers in 32 states. (Florida passed a ban in April that went into effect this fall.) After receiving death threats over the summer, Doricko now travels with security.
Caught between accusations that cloud seeding is too powerful and doubts that it can ever be effective, Rainmaker s charting a narrow path. Doricko acknowledges that navigating the political crosscurrents while building a startup and maturing his faith has taken a toll.
Two years ago, in a widely viewed interview with tech-world chronicler John Coogan, Doricko was jacked and tanned, a high-wattage presence at ease in his role as Gundo super-connector, as Coogan describes him. These days, Doricko shuttles between cold warehouses on early-morning flights. In more recent interviews, shadows mark his face, and there is a wary fatigue to his posture.
On the one hand, I get to rely on God, which definitely hardens and strengthens me, he says. On the other hand, because the stakes are cosmic, when I fail, it definitely feels like Im taking a step towards eternal hellfire.
Before Elijah, there were 62 prototype quadcopters, all of which have been retired. To perform effectively, Rainmakers drones must fly far higher into the atmosphere than off-the-shelf modelsup to 15,000 feetto reach the clouds that are the best candidates for seeding. Thats the easy part.
The drones have to be able to fly in the most severe icing conditions, because the more cooled liquid in the atmosphere, the more water we can bring down, Doricko says as we walk through the startups bare-bones Utah warehouse, home to failed experiments, custom radar systems bound for mountaintops, and a Cat Wars calendar. But the more cooled liquid is in the atmosphere, the more dangerous it is for any aircraft.
The breakthrough came in the form of an innovative deicing system. Doricko picks up a black drone propeller, its aerodynamic wing lined with what looks like a yellow maze. You take battery power, basically, and then you just port it to the propellers, he says. [The resistors] heat up the blades and melt the ice off as it accretes.
The system also doubles as a gauge for how much liquid is in the cloud, a challenging but essential data point for Rainmaker to collect. If you know the [air] temperature and how much power it takes to melt the ice, then you can infer how much liquid is in the cloud based on the rate at which its icing. So, it doubles as this crazy probe.
It took the company more than a year to arrive at Elijah, which has been engineered to withstand winter winds and three kinds of ice (smooth glaze, rough rime, and a combination of the two). In testing, the model successfully flew in 25-meters-per-second winds at 14,999 feet. According to Rainmaker, no other quadcopter can perform in those conditions (fixed-wing drones can manage it but cost at least $2,000 apiece and require a runway). Already, the startup has 75 Elijah drones ready to go.
Thats the hardware. Doricko is also trying to operationalize a new approach to cloud seeding. Before Rainmaker, he founded a startup that monitored groundwater for customers in Texas. At a conference, he learned about cloud seedings attribution problem: Though operators could record precipitation after their flights, they couldnt prove they caused it. A 2017 study suggested that seeding in a zigzag flight pattern would lead to precipitation that fell with an anthropogenic (or human) signature.
What I started with was, okay, if you can now measure where you should be seeding and what the yields are, says Doricko, you can actually scale this technology and sell it. Today, Rainmakers drones move in distinctly human-made flight patterns.
In keeping with Rainmakers disciplined approach, head of software Darrion Vinson is developing what he calls a manufacturing execution system. He wants to turn cloud seeding into a replicable, reliable technology.
Liquid Asset: Rainmaker founder and CEO Augustus Doricko is bringing new ideas to the cloud-seeding industry. [Photo: Ethan Gulley]
He joined Rainmaker in 2024 from Hadrian, an aerospace and defense startup, though he and Doricko originally met at an El Segundo bar: Vinson was reading Robert Caros multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson; the two hit it off talking about infrastructure development in postwar America.
Doricko hopes to one day take Vinsons rain manufacturing model around the world. Demand for new sources of water is growing due to drought, climate change, and groundwater depletion. Doricko envisions working for governments in arid regions like the Middle East as well as clients in breadbasket areas struggling to irrigate crops.
Kaitlyn Suski, Rainmakers head of research, oversees the data that will demonstrate Rainmakers effectiveness. One of Dorickos first hires, Suski initially felt out of place in Gundo culture after spending years in academia studying aerosol cloud interactions and ice nucleation.
They have a bunch of swords and things in the office, she says of her colleagues. At first I was sort of like, ‘Who cares about swords?’ But shes found a way to make it work: Shes added a disco ball to the mix.
Suski will be tracking the companys Great Salt Lake operations this winter in coordination with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as well as scientists from the University of Utah and Utah State. Thats how cloud seeding is going to get bigger, to have more people trust it and want to invest in it, she says.
Doricko is confident enough in cloud seedings prospects that he has already tasked Suski with researching alternatives to silver iodide. When released into a cloud, silver iodide serves as an ice-nucleating particle, around which water forms ice crystals and then falls to the ground as precipitation.
Silver iodide has been shown to be safe at the concentrations Rainmaker is currently utilizing. But Doricko dreams of operating around the world at a thousand times his current scale.
In nature, a lot of the best ice-nucleating particles are biological things, either bacteria or fungi or things like that, which are more active than silver iodide, Suski says. A more active, organic particle would have the added benefit of performing well in warmer temperatures, extending both Rainmakers active season and the geographies where it could operate.
But conducting this kind of science in public view at a time when science itself is under attack isnt for the faint of heart.
Doricko was watching the July fourth fireworks on Manhattan Beach in California when news about catastrophic floods in Texas started to appear. Rain was pounding the Texas Hill Country, and the Guadalupe River was surging. By the time the storm cleared, 130 people had died.
Doricko remembers thinking that evening that there would likely be questions about Rainmakers role. Two days earlier, the company had worked in Runge, Texas, for the South Texas Weather Modification Association, which represents local farmers. Rainmker released silver iodide into two clouds, then suspended operations when forecasts showed a system moving in. The worst of the flooding took place 125 miles from Runge.
The moment where everything became very surreal was on [July] fifth, when General Mike Flynn tweeted about us, Doricko says.
In a series of posts on X that racked up 2.3 million views, Trumps former national security adviser pointed a finger at Rainmaker and said, Anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves. Two weeks later, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene proposed legislation that would ban weather modification at the federal level.
Doricko wasnt completely surprised by the uproarchemtrail conspiracy theorists have been targeting cloud seeding for years. (Chemtrail conspiracists believe that airplane contrails are harmful chemicals released by the government.)
As insinuations by Flynn and others went viral, Doricko began receiving hundreds of emailed death threats. He was suddenly cast as a Silicon Valley villain bent on playing God and controlling the weather. We realized we had to go defend ourselves in public, he says.
Doricko embarked on a tour of right-wing podcasts, speaking with Dinesh DSouza (as part of a Did the Jews Kill Christ? episode), former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan (of The Shawn Ryan Show), Tim Pool (Timcast IRL), and others. In conversation after conversation, he took in accusations that cloud seeding is sky terrorism and that he himself is the face of Big Cloud, even Oppenheimer. He calmly walked listeners through the safety of Rainmakers techniques. He explained that the Hill Country storms produced 4 trillion gallons of precipitation, while a successful cloud-seeding mission produces 10 million gallons, at most.
[Illustration: Matt Carlson]
He slipped into jargon only occasionally: You ever heard of aerosol invigoration of convection, bro? We make them bigger, the clouds, he tried to reason with a fellow guest on Timcast IRL. The guest was unmoved.
Meanwhile, Doricko is seeking allies in Washington. In September, he scored a modest victory: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a report that rebutted chemtrail conspiracies and spelled out the difference between cloud seeding and still theoretical climate-engineering techniques like solar radiation modification, which would reflect the suns rays into space.
Im super grateful for the level head that [EPA administrator] Lee Zeldin and the rest of the EPA had on that, Doricko says. Would I have been even more stoked and grateful if they had said that [cloud seeding] was a useful water supply tool? Totally. But I understand, given the political reality, why theyre measured in their discussion of it.
Doricko has worked to avoid being pigeonholed politically. In April, he shared a photo of himself, dressed in Nikes and a tan suit, shaking hands with Bill Clinton. It was a pleasure discussing how cloud seeding can enhance water supplies with #42! he wrote. Four months later, he smiled alongside Governor Gavin Newsom: Grateful to @CAgovernor for investing in El Segundo, California.
Buddying up with the countrys worstthis is Rainmaker, one X user sniped of the Newsom photo.
I love everybody and will work with people that want to give farms and ecosystems the water they need, Doricko replied.
In Rainmaker, conspiracy theorists have found an irresistible target. Not only is the startup releasing particles into the air, its also viewed as an extension of Big Tech, which is reviled in conspiracy circles for its perceived censorship regime.
The irony is that Doricko is sympathetic to his adversaries concerns when it comes to the role of tech platforms as arbiters of speech. I dont feel much attachment at all to Silicon Valley, he says as we drive away from the flight test site in a company pickup truck. I feel very little even to tech. He considers the idea that tech companies from the coasts would lord over middle America to be so wrong.
Dorickos own path through online political spaces has taken several turns. At Berkeley, he was involved in Turning Point USA, the conservative campus organization founded by Charlie Kirk. When the pandemic led to lockdowns and George Floyds death prompted protests, Doricko grew dissatisfied with Turning Points slogans.
It didnt seem like a broad notion that socialism sucks was sufficient to fix the really deeply ingrained cultural and religious issues that we had, he says of his mindset. A friend showed him a few videos of Nick Fuentes; Doricko says he found Fuentess message about Christian revival appealing.
In June 2020, according to the Internet Archive, Doricko was tweeting regularly about BLM, admonishing protesters for taking down statues and rioters for destruction in Santa Monica. Amid these posts, he sent out a pair of tweets to Fuentes and America First Students founder Jaden McNeil about creating a chapter of the organization at Berkeley.
He then announced that he’d been dropped from a conservative student publication on the grounds of suspecting I support #AmericaFirst, he wrote. I thought Id clear the water by stating that I do explicitly. I believe in Christianity, the nuclear family, the American worker and soldier. (Before going deaf in his right ear on a trip to Costa Rica, Doricko hoped to enter the Naval Academy and become an astronaut.)
Fuentes was also active on Twitter at the time. The story of our country is the establishment and the violent mob working together to destroy White, Christian, conservative Americans, he wrote the same week that Doricko tagged him.
In our first conversation about this period, Doricko argues, somewhat defiantly, that he was drawn to America First as an ideal. The phrase America First, insofar as it exemplifies an interest in caring about the U.S.thats where that came from, and thats still what I believe, he says, dressed in a red hoodie, on a video call from Rainmakers Gundo headquarters. I love everybody, he says, as I think our Lord compels us to, desiring their benefit, no matter anything about them.
In a later conversation, Doricko is more reflective. He says that he didnt know about Fuentess white nationalist and antisemitic hstory, including his role as a leader of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
No, dude, I did not know that. I think the only thing that I knew up until 2021 or 2022 [about Charlottesville] was that there was a car accident where someone drove into a bunch of people. When the rally took place in 2017, Doricko adds, I was in high school. I was listening to my dads clips of Ronald Reagan speeches.
He also says the world is a lot more complicated than he thought it was when he was 19 and 20. I hadnt been baptized; I wasnt fully sold on Christendom at that point. I still have more sin in my life than I ought, but I also believe that I have a lot more love in my heart now than I did back then, too.
He says he came to his faith through logic, by evaluating evidence of Jesuss death and resurrection. More recently, hes been drawn to Orthodox Christianitys mysticism.
One thing Doricko doesnt believe in is silence. Even in high school, he says, he was a provocateur. Following the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, he was involved in the nationwide student walkout for school safety. (While other students advocated for gun control, he says his motivation was simply keeping his school safe.)
Why is it that people govern their speech so much? Why is it that people dont say what they think and how they feel? I do not empathize at all with that, he says. The world around us exists only because of the testimony to truth, to faith, to goodness, and the sacrifice of people that came before us, and I dont think people are aware that it could be lost very easily.
The shores of Great Salt Lake State Park are quiet the day after Rainmakers flight training. Children on a field trip have tossed their shoes aside and are wading in the shallow water. But the surrounding shoreline is desolate, a reminder that theres no meaningful recreational constituency fighting to save the ugly duckling of a lake.
Zachary Frankel, executive director of advocacy and research group the Utah Rivers Council, could go on for hours about the problems with water regulation and management in Utah, from the low price that Salt Lake City residents pay for water to the legacy system of agricultural canals that crisscross the states new metropolitan areas. Cloud seeding, he notes, doesnt solve those issues. For years, hes been pushing to restore the lake to 4,200 feet above sea level. At the moment, its at 950 feet.
Cloud seeding is a politically palatable solution, he says as we sit in his office, watching a landscaping crew water the sloping grass lawn behind the building. Its a nice game for Utah politicians to pretend theyre kissing the Great Salt Lake baby, that this is gonna work. But its not.
There are solutions, such as reining in water rights speculation, that would deliver vast quantities of water for pennies on the dollar, but they come with a political cost. The state of Utah doesnt want to regulate its way to saving the lake.
Even at the Utah Division of Water Resources, where the annual cloud-seeding budget ballooned from $350,000 in 2022 to $5 million, officials acknowledge that cloud seeding is no panacea. Can cloud seeding, alone, save the Great Salt Lake? No, were not at that point in terms of the technology, says Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with the state water authority. I think where we come in is trying to make sure those high-elevation reservoirs are staying full.
If the reservoirs stay full, the thinking goes, there will be enough water for all parties: agriculture, industry, real estate development, andyesthe terminal lake itself. But the math is daunting. Separate from any accounting around diversion, the lake loses an estimated 3 million acre feet of water to evaporation each year. At best, Jennings hopes to see Rainmaker produce 250,000 acre feet.
I am confident that were gonna get punched in the face every which way to Sunday trying to produce the results that we want, Doricko says. Yet, hes undeterred. This seasons projects in the American West are only the beginning. We know that this is a solvable problem. What we have to do is just constantly iterate.
God made the world in six days. But having dominion over creation is the work of a lifetime.
Faking tends to get a bad rap. We celebrate authenticity, praise, and honesty, and preach radical transparencyas if the workplace would magically improve if everyone walked around expressing their unfiltered true selves.
But, imagine for a moment what unedited human authenticity would actually look like in a corporate setting: colleagues announcing every irritation, managers confessing every insecurity, leaders sharing every impulsive thought or half-baked opinion. Actually, that doesnt look overly different from many workplaces!
And yet, most of us are well aware of the dangers of pure self-expression, even if the realization comes mostly from analyzing others rather than ourselves. Its why (most) people dont shout at their boss when theyre annoyed, why teams dont openly critique every colleague they find irritating, and why we dont walk into Monday meetings narrating the full emotional unpacking of our weekend. Okay, some people actually do, but its painful to witness and awkward, to say the least. Total honesty is not a virtue, but a reputational hazard.
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Strategic self-editing
For that reason, faking good, or engaging in strategic self-presentation (adjusting your behavior in order to sacrifice your right of self-expression for the benefit of others, and in turn, yourself), is far more common than we think. Most professionals engage in small, strategic acts of self-editing or impression management every single day; and the best ones are so good at it that they come across as authentic.
Examples include:
Smiling politely through a tedious meeting youd rather not attend, because theres just no point to it.
Pretending to be more confident than you feel before delivering a presentation, because it makes you seem more competent.
Downplaying frustration with a colleague to maintain team harmony, because whats the point of escalating?
Expressing enthusiasm for a new initiative you suspect may not survive the quarter, because the alternative (expressing your sincere objection) will jeopardize your political cache.
Social grease
To be sure, the above examples arent moral failures, but rather, the lubricant that keeps human groups from falling apart. And more often than not, some degree of faking is preferable to complete honesty or radical transparency. For example, most people prefer fake kindness than genuine rudeness, or fake positive feedback to honest criticism.
In line, consider:
A leader who shares every fear or insecurity would destabilize their team.
A colleague who offers unfiltered feedback would be unbearable.
A customer-facing employee who reacts authentically to rude clients would put the company at risk (and lose their job before this can become a pattern).
A manager who says what they really think during performance reviews would end up with more resignations than development plans.
To make matters more complicated, faking is extremely hard to assesspartly because people lie to themselves all the time, and often for adaptive reasons. Evolutionarily, self-deception helped humans project confidence, reduce anxiety, and persuade others: fooling others is easier when you can fool yourself first. Cognitive biases such as optimism bias (Im more capable than the evidence suggests) or the illusion of control (Ive got this under control) help people navigate uncertainty and maintain motivation. These subtle self-delusions blur the line between strategic faking and genuine belief.
Curating our corporate persona
So how should we interpret the relentless pressure to be honest, be yourself, or bring your whole self to work? At best, these mantras are idealistic; at worst, theyre hypocritical. We often want others to be radically transparent so we can have more data about their weaknesses and vulnerabilities . . . while we quietly curate our own professional persona to appear competent, composed, and likable.
In truth, workplaces function better when people know how to fake constructively. Impression management is not the enemy; in many ways, it is the behavioral ingredient behind emotional intelligence. People who can regulate their impulses, moderate their reactions, and manage how they come across are easier to follow, easier to collaborate with, and far more effective as leaders.
Crucially, what matters is not how authentic or honest you believe yourself to be, but how authentic and trustworthy others perceive you to be. And herein lies the paradox: the people who are consistently viewed as authentic, grounded, and trustworthy tend to engage in a great deal of strategic impression management.
Examples include:
Leaders who rehearse their spontaneous town hall remarks to ensure they land with sincerity.
Managers who deliberately regulate their emotions to project calm under pressure (more Angela Merkel than Tony Soprano).
Colleagues who consciously show empathy, even when they dont feel it naturally, because they know it strengthens relationships. Note that since empathy evolves as a neural adaptation to prioritize people who are genetically related to us (or part of our tribe), the only way to work with people who are different from us is to fake it, engaging in rational or artificial tolerance and kindness instead.
None of this is fake in the deceptive sense: it is practiced, intentional, and other-oriented, which is precisely why it works.
A balance of honesty and tact
In the end, the real mistake is treating authenticity and faking as opposites. Healthy workplaces actually depend on people who can manage themselves thoughtfully, speak honestly but tactfully, and project the best versions of who they are, understanding where their right to just be themselves ends and their obligation to others beginseven when it doesnt perfectly match how they feel in the moment. The goal is not to eliminate faking; it is to elevate it into a mature, prosocial skill. After all, the best leaders are not those who express their true selves without inhibition, but those who know when to edit, when to filter, and when to perform the version of themselves that helps others succeed. In that sense, it would be logical to redefine honesty as the inability to display emotional intelligence.
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As data centers strain the power grid, utilities are scrambling to build new power plants. But a startup in California is one of a handful focusing on the problem from a different angle: building a network of batteries and solar panels at homes to relieve pressure on the grid more quickly.
In some cases, thanks to state funding, low-income homeowners can get the systems installed at no cost, and then start saving on their electric bills and have access to backup power if the grid goes down. Others pay a subscription thats lower than their previous electric bill. Then the startup, called Haven, manages the flow of power back to the grid.
Why utilities see Havens network as a mini power plant
We own and operate all the batteries, says Haven CEO Vinnie Campo. (The company focuses on batteries, but also installs and owns connected rooftop solar panels at some homes.) We’re then able to provide to the utility a fixed dispatch or fixed capacity from those batteries. They can almost think of it as building a mini power plant exactly where they need it.
Haven works with utilities to identify spots in the grid that need helpsubstations that are overloaded, or feeder lines that are constrainedand then partners with the utility to find homeowners in those areas who are interested in installing new equipment at their homes.
[Photo: Kyle Gentz/courtesy Haven]
In aggregate, thousands of coordinated batteries are a powerful tool. Its not that we actually need that much net new generation. What the grid really needs is more power at the right time, Campo says. The grid is mostly underutilized its in the 30-40% range on a given day. Batteries are the most important part of the missing piece here, which is how you can absorb as much energy in the middle of the day when its being produced but not used, and shift that to later periods in the evening when you have a lot of electric demand coming online.
A no-cost way for low-income homeowners to get batteries
For homeowners, theres a clear incentive to participate as electric bills keep surging. In California, between 2019 and 2023, electricity rates rose by 47%. Customers who subscribe to Haven can get 20-30% savings on electric bills, helping ease the pain. For customers who qualify for state funding and install both solar and batteries, bills can drop by 90%.
They see 80 to 90% bill savings because they dont have to pay anything for it, but theyre getting all of the benefits of the solar and battery system, says Campo.
[Photo: Kyle Gentz/courtesy Haven]
The state funding comes through Californias larger Self-Generation Incentive Program, which started rolling out $280 million for batteries and optional paired solar panels earlier this year. To qualify for the rebates, homeowners have to meet low-income requirements and live in areas that are at high risk of fires or public safety power shutoffs.
In theory, low-income homeowners could get the systems on their own. But that could require spending tens of thousands of dollars upfront and then waiting months to get reimbursement and the savings on their electric vills.. Haven helps by handling the paperwork and providing the capital.
The deal is so good that it created another challenge: convincing homeowners that its real. When I found Haven, I was skeptical, says Alex Colocho, a resident in Oceanside, California. I was like, theres no way that a company would put up all the cash up front to get me this product. After digging into it, he eventually decided to move forward, and had a battery installed in August.
Colocho already had solar, and had taken advantage of other state incentives to electrifyfor example, trading in an old gas car for an EV, and switching to a heat pump. As his family used more electricity, they wanted to take better advantage of their solar power, storing it to use at night. But, he says, if this program wasnt there, we would have never gotten the battery.
Customers like Colocho have referred others. Its not no money down, its ‘no money at all,’ and that creates this viral referral loop where they tell their friends and family, says Campo. (Colocho has even created a side gig for himself helping neighbors access this and other incentives.)
Residential batteries could scale faster than new power plants
Haven has installed around 1,000 systems so far, and theres the potential to install as many as 10,000 systems (a mix of battery-only and solar-plus-battery systems) through the state program. The company is also ramping up its subscription offering for other customers. Haven recently raised $40 million in new funding, including a $25 million credit facility, which it will use in part to expand to other states facing similar grid challenges. Already, its virtual power plant is around 10 megawatts in size, with another 50 megawatts of capacity in development in California.
[Photo: Kyle Gentz/courtesy Haven]
The process isnt completely seamless yet, since the company still has to deal with delays from local permitting and getting connected to he grid. Still, unlocking more energy capacity this way is faster than trying to build large new power plantsparticularly things like new nuclear tech that may be a decade away from being ready, or gas plants that face five-year delays on new turbines.
One recent report suggested that tech companies should help pay to install solar and batteries at homes as a way to access the power they need more quickly and avoid emissions. Some other companies, like Base Powera startup that raised $1 billion in Octoberare taking a similar approach as Haven and also building networks of batteries to support the grid.
Even though it might seem like a consumer service business at first glance, Haven really is an infrastructure business where we’re building battery capacity for utilities, says Campo. There’s a lot of talk around grid-scale batteries and energy storage. We think the missing piece and the fast deployment piece is residential.
