Welcome to The Interference ⚡️

A bi-weekly dispatch of the biggest stories about the open web, media, ad tech, personal data, security, and AI—delivered in bite-sized summaries.

Author

Vishveshwar Jatain
January 06, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Ever heard the saying: “What got you here won’t get you there”?

Of course you have.

Growing up in the 90s, running AOL chat on a crappy 56K dial-up connection, I recall thinking: “If I ever got a 1Mbps line, I would literally become god”. 5 years later, DSL delivered that mythical 1Mbps. It was fun but I did not become god (much to my dismay). Fast forward another 5 years, ISPs were pushing a gigabit over fiber optic.

So what’s the big deal about that? In the first 5 years, network bandwidth increased by a factor of 18X. And in the next 5 years? 1000X.

That’s just yet another manifestation of Moore’s Law of course. In the computational world, exponential growth is the rule, not the exception.

In short, that’s the theme of this newsletter. It’s about new things interfering with the old order—and the constructive or destructive result of it.

Narrowly applied, drawing on my experience as a marketer, this means commentary on how technology is changing the way demand gen, product marketing, GTM, and RevOps work, with the occasional piece on ad tech.

Broadly applied, it means tackling the big stuff: What is consciousness? Is our consciousness real or illusionary? How far is AI from achieving anything resembling it? Or other fascinating stuff that I come across. For example, 1% of the static on your TV comes from the Big Bang? Gets me every time.

People say this all the time now: It’s never been easier for one person to do the job of 5 with AI at their disposal. Paradoxically, the risk of becoming redundant holding the bag of old tools and tricks has never been greater.

What got you here won’t get you there.

This newsletter is my attempt to journal my own thinking on the following topics:

  1. What’s happening in media and technology that you need to know

  2. How do you give yourself an unfair advantage at work and in business using technology that is available now

  3. How can you best equip yourself for a future that is driven by abundant, limitless computational power

The litmus test? To produce the type of writing that I would like to read.