About Kludder

Kludder is a free weekly newsletter about technology and AI.

I'm not a programmer. I can't tell you how a large language model works under the hood, and I have no interest in pretending I can.

What I am is curious. And a little worried.

Over the past few years, technology has quietly moved from the margins of everyday life to the very centre of it. The apps we used to scroll mindlessly are now shaping elections, displacing workers, and rewriting the rules of what it means to own something. Your data, your attention, your image. The companies behind them have become more powerful than most governments. And the debate hasn't kept up.

That's what Kludder is for.

Every Thursday, a new piece lands in your inbox. Sometimes it's a deep dive into a single story, like the collapse of the NFT market, the AI safety researcher who quit to write poetry, or the smartwatch turning Chinese schoolchildren into a popularity contest. Sometimes it's a roundup of the week's most important tech developments, filtered through a question I keep coming back to: what does this actually mean for the rest of us?

I write from a Norwegian and European perspective, which I've come to think of as an advantage rather than a limitation. Silicon Valley has its own worldview: Growth above all, disruption as virtue, privacy as a relic. That worldview deserves scrutiny.

Kludder is read by leaders, analysts, politicians, teachers, and people who simply want to understand the world they're living in. It has found its way into Norwegian boardrooms and, rumour has it, into the corridors of Parliament. I don't write it for any of them specifically. I write it because technology is too important to be left to the technologists. But also because writing is how I make sense of things.

I try to be honest about what I don't know. I link to my sources. I have views, and I share them, but only after reading up on the topic first.

If you've ever closed a tab about AI feeling more confused than when you opened it, this newsletter is for you. If you've ever wondered whether anyone is asking the right questions about where all of this is heading, Kludder is asking them.

Subscribe below. It's free, it arrives once a week, and you can leave whenever you like.

Though I hope you'll stay.

— Sebastian

You can reach me at sebastian@kludder.tech