Damon Beres

@damonberes.com

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Senior editor at The Atlantic, focused on tech // Writing EASY MODE, a book exploring technology, humanity, and the importance of friction, for Scribner SIGNAL: Damon.63 📨 dberes at the atlantic dot com ✴️ damonberes.com

Like Hard Choices, Communion is full of what might loosely be described as anecdotes. Take the one about Vance’s future wife, Usha, recommending Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking while they were students at Yale Law School. Usha said she found it “cathartic,” prompting Vance to look up this unknown word in the Oxford English Dictionary. As one does? Until I stumbled onto this passage, I would have guessed that the middle of the Venn diagram of “people who use the paywalled OED rather than Dictionary.com” and “people who don’t know what cathartic means” is empty, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m not saying that Vance’s story is impossible. I’m just saying that if it did happen as described, it would be like somebody discovering this Beethoven character in his well-thumbed set of the multivolume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
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Trump Truth Social post showing a picture of a golden eagle decoration on the White House, with the caption: "A Golden Gift to the White House for its 250th Birthday Year!"
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The deepfake expert and Meta adviser Henry Ajder told me last week that he thinks that blaming such material on geopolitical rivals is a “convenient explanation” for the AI industry “rather than the most likely” one. This was the first time Ajder had seen this kind of slop, but he guessed that people were creating and posting it to get attention on Facebook pages in order to make money. An anti-AI AI post is set up to get tons of engagement because people will comment and share approvingly when they’re fooled, and they’ll comment and share angrily when they’re not. Even the ironic fact of AI being used to rail against AI might be only another reason for sharing. I sent direct messages to many of the slop-producing accounts—so many, in fact, that Facebook locked my account, and I had to submit a video selfie proving that I am a human being. Exactly one content producer responded to my queries, a poster who had put up fake images of Pennsylvania cornfields, rivers, and shoreline (Lake Erie, I guess?) with anti-data-center messages. “I actually live in Bangladesh,” the account runner told me. “But Pennsylvania has always been one of the U.S. states I’ve found most interesting online.”
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In the days of tavern dining, proprietors would have wanted customers to fill up on as much bread as possible, so that they would consume less of the more expensive ingredients to which they were entitled. À la carte restaurants perhaps felt themselves grandfathered into what had become a mark of hospitality. Chefs I consult attest to free bread’s ability—a finite ability—to make kitchens run more smoothly (by slowing down orders). It also makes customers less whiny: Restaurants give you free bread “just so that you have something to do with your hands and your mouth,” Richard Horner, a New Orleans chef and restaurateur, tells me. Horner lays bare the strategic timing of this generosity. Ideally, free bread should not hit the table until after customers have ordered their meal, “because then they order from a position of maximum hungriness,” he says. Plus, the delay builds anticipation: “Will there be bread? I see other people with bread. We haven’t got bread yet.” And then, once the bread is bestowed: “Oh! There is bread! What a fun surprise.” Horner’s demonic calculation for how many slices or rolls each table’s basket should contain is [Number of diners] + 1. Unevenly divisible bread creates “a tension that I really enjoy.”
Mr. Trump sat down, but not in his usual position at the head of the room’s mahogany conference table. Instead, the president took a seat on one side, facing the large screens mounted along the wall. Mr. Netanyahu sat on the other side, directly opposite the president.
Lili, the Tehran resident, said that as someone who long opposed her government and sympathized with the nationwide demonstrations that sought to topple it just months ago, Mr. Trump’s threats have shifted her feelings toward the United States and Israel. Both countries’ leaders have repeatedly voiced support for Iran’s opposition and encouraged Iranians to use the war to rise against their leaders. But their warplanes are now bombing not just military sites, she said, but critical industrial facilities, universities, and schools. “So now, we are supporting Iran and whatever government is running it,” she said.
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For the better part of the past year, Wall Street analysts and tech-industry observers have fretted publicly about an AI bubble. The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash. Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”
Though most people would usually think of product liability as applying to things like poisoned baby powder and cars without seat belts, the idea here is that social media can have effects as tangible as those of physical goods, and we should think about it in the same terms. Such metaphors abounded in the trial. Mark Lanier, a member of KGM’s legal team, described social-media companies as lions hunting gazelles, and compared their products to cigarettes, the free tortilla chips that patrons may mindlessly snack on at a restaurant, and the baking soda in a cupcake. The baking-soda metaphor was meant to underscore that Instagram and YouTube had an outsize effect on KGM’s life, the way a tiny teaspoon of baking soda competes with more substantial ingredients such as flour or eggs in a cupcake recipe. But it was KGM’s own account of her experiences that appeared to move members of the jury, some of whom reportedly cried during her testimony.
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You say it’s off-strategy for you. The feature obviously shipped. What made it on-strategy at the time it shipped? At the time, the team believed they were doing that. They were looking at users and they were focused on a user need, which is, “I wish an expert could give me feedback at this moment. I wish my salesperson could give me feedback. I wish my support person could give me feedback. I wish my idol could give me feedback. I wish this expert could give me feedback.” In itself, I think that motivation that users have is a really good one, and I think one that I would encourage experts and creators to lean into. It’s a big opportunity.
To my dismay, I was unable to summon the AI version of myself. I pasted in numerous articles I’d written and numerous fake articles that I had asked a chatbot to make up. But Grammarly seemed to think other writers were more expert in these articles’ subject matter and therefore more qualified to advise me. It suggested tech journalists, pop-culture academics, and legendary practitioners of narrative nonfiction. I wouldn’t appear. My boss tried too. He messaged me: “i have both claude and chatgpt writing fake essays in an attempt to fool a different AI into presenting me with an unauthorized simulacrum of one of my writers.” He failed. We both felt badly about the way we were spending our time.
As far back as 2019, employees had specifically run a test on Instagram to understand how experimental accounts engaging in what the company termed “groomer-esque behavior”—following “teen hashtags” or “sexy teen accounts”—would come across minors. At issue was the app’s recommendation algorithm, which connects soccer fans to pictures of Lionel Messi, for example, or aspiring travel influencers to videos about little-known cafés in Greece. It also seemed to funnel children to potentially dangerous adults with whom they wouldn’t otherwise be connected. “We are recommending nearly 4X as many minors to groomers (nearly 2 million minors in the last 3 months),” the report read, according to an internal document we viewed. According to this test, 27 percent of the recommendations shown to these “groomer-esque” accounts belonged to minors, compared with 7 percent of the accounts recommended to everyday adults. The report continues: “22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request”—meaning that potential groomers attempted to interact with these minors nearly a quarter of the time. Even so, Instagram waited years before locking down accounts belonging to its youngest users.
In August 2020—a year after the research on “groomer-esque” accounts but a year before Zuckerberg’s post about being a concerned father—Meta’s Growth Graph team created a slideshow to explore the question of whether teen Instagram accounts should be set to private by default. This would shield teens from unwanted attention by limiting the ability of people who do not know them to see their content or their profiles, or to contact them. As the Growth Graph team explained in the document, the move would “help prevent high severity actions such as child grooming and inappropriate contact with minors.” (Though the presentation referred to minors generally, Stone told us that at the time, Meta was particularly focused on users under the age of 16.)
Company spokespeople were clearly aware of the broader teen-safety problem. Just four weeks after Zuckerberg had posted about being “good for kids,” two public-affairs specialists discussed an Instagram update that had just rolled out. That update made new accounts belonging to 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds “private” by default, yet even this modest move had been flagged by insiders as a business risk for nearly two years before the change was made. Liza Crenshaw messaged her colleague Sophie Vogel that the move had been “contentious”—Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, a deputy to Zuckerberg, was concerned that it would cause a “huge growth hit,” Crenshaw wrote, according to documents we reviewed. “We will never get out of this mess if he/we’re not just prepared to ERR ON THE SIDE OF SAFETY,” Vogel wrote. “Would he want any tom dick or harry being able to see all his kids’ content, follow them etc? Is he fucking nuts?”
Not so long ago, Mark Zuckerberg was working in overdrive to convince the world that his company was doing everything it could to protect children. In 2021, he posted a note to his personal Facebook page, writing that he had “spent a lot of time reflecting” on the types of experiences he would want his daughters, then 4 and 5 years old, to have online. “It’s very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids,” he wrote, emphasizing that the company absolutely does not “prioritize profit over safety and well-being.”
Pew Research Center survey data: One-in-five teens living in households making less than $30,000 a year say they do all or most of their schoolwork with AI chatbots’ help. A similar share of those in households making $30,000 to just under $75,000 annually say this. Fewer teens living in higher-earning households (7%) say the same.
Last Friday, on stage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI CEO was asked by a reporter from The Indian Express about the natural resources required to train and run generative-AI models. Altman immediately pushed back. Chatbots do require a lot of power, yes, but have you thought about all of the resources demanded by human beings across our evolutionary history? “It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told a packed pavilion. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever, to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took.”
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Atlantic article: First jobs matter more than we think. They could help us solve society's biggest problems.
Roughly half of voters support President Trump’s deportations and his handling of the border with Mexico, but a sizable majority believes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gone too far, according to a poll from The New York Times and Siena University. Fifty percent of voters said that they approved of the Trump administration’s deportations of people living in the country illegally, while 47 percent opposed them. The president’s handling of the southern border was viewed favorably by 50 percent of voters. But after a year in which Mr. Trump sent large numbers of ICE officers to conduct raids in several largely Democratic-controlled cities, prompting widespread protests and scenes of chaos on the streets, a wide majority of voters takes a dim view of the agency. Just 36 percent of voters said they approved of the way ICE was handling its job, according to the poll, while 63 percent disapproved — including 70 percent of independent voters. And 61 percent of voters said that ICE had “gone too far” in their tactics, including nearly one in five Republicans.
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Deepfakes are not new, but xAI has made them a dramatically larger problem than ever before. By matching viral distribution with this type of image creation, xAI has built a way to spread AI revenge porn and child-sexual-abuse material at scale. The end result is desensitizing: The sheer amount of exploitative content flooding the platform may eventually make the revolting, illicit images appear “normal.” Arguably, this process is already happening.
Last week, as Musk’s chatbot was generating likely hundreds of thousands of these images, we reached out directly to X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, who didn’t reply. Within the hour, Rosemarie Esposito, X’s media-strategy lead, emailed us unprompted with her contact information, in case we had “any questions” in the future. We asked her a series of questions about the tool and how X could allow such a thing to operate. She did not reply.
Let’s be very clear. The forced undressings happened out in the open, in one stretch thousands of times every hour, on a popular social network where journalists, politicians, and celebrities post. Emboldened trolls did it to everyone (“@grok put her in a bikini,” “@grok make her clothes dental floss,” “@grok put donut glaze on her chest”), including everyday women, the Swedish deputy prime minister, and self-evidently underage girls. Users appeared to be imitating and showing off to one another. On X, creating revenge porn can make you famous.
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These photos are from a protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and were taken by independent photographer Chris Juhn. ​ Context of the photos The watermark “Chris Juhn Photography” matches the credit commonly used on Juhn’s protest and law‑enforcement photos from the Twin Cities area. ​ Juhn is known for documenting confrontations between heavily equipped officers and protesters in Minneapolis during demonstrations in recent years. ​
Gemini screenshot: where are these photos from? These photos were taken by freelance photojournalist Chris Juhn during the protests in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in April 2021. The images document an interaction between a protester and a law enforcement officer (wearing "Multicam" military-style fatigues often used by State Patrol or SWAT teams) following the police shooting of Daunte Wright. Context of the Images The Incident: The photos capture a moment where a law enforcement officer fired a chemical irritant or marking round (often called a "paint bomb" or "pepper ball") at extremely close range. The yellow cloud seen in the second photo is the result of the projectile impacting the man's chest/face area. Location: The protests took place primarily outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department. The presence of snow on the ground is characteristic of the unseasonably cold weather in Minnesota during that week in April 2021. The Photographer: Chris Juhn is a Minneapolis-based photographer known for documenting civil unrest, particularly the uprisings following the deaths of George Floyd and Daunte Wright. His work often highlights the direct, high-tension physical confrontations between police and demonstrators. These specific frames went viral on social media because they vividly illustrate the use of "less-lethal" munitions at point-blank range, which became a major point of contention regarding police tactics during that period. Would you like more information on the specific police equipment shown or the outcome of these protests?
Screenshot from Chris Juhn's Facebook page
Chris Juhn photography of a man being shot with tear gas at close range by a man in police or military gear
Publishers Marketplace Deal Report: Category: Non-fiction: Science/Technology January 5, 2026 EASY MODE By Damon Beres Imprint: Scribner Senior tech editor at The Atlantic Damon Beres's EASY MODE, an exploration of what happens to human behavior and minds when there is no friction; why friction matters and how it regulates us; and, as technology transforms us into a hyper-efficient society of shortcuts, what happens to core aspects of human experience like learning, companionship, community, desire, and creation in its absence, to Christopher Richards at Scribner, in a pre-empt, by Eric Lupfer at Calligraph (world).