🔥 New Gitcoin site just dropped Why? The funding landscape is fragmented. Lessons aren't being shared. Experiments are happening in isolation. So we built a living reference: the tools, the teams, the research, the results. All in one place. Turning hard-won experience into something everyone can use → gitcoin.co Here's what's on it 👇🧵

More Americans say they would rather live next to a nuclear power plant than a data center. 188 opposition groups across 40 states. $64 billion in projects blocked or delayed. A moratorium bill sitting on Governor Hochul's desk right now. The coverage says these communities fear noise and water bills – but what they're actually fighting is critical infra being built around them faster than they can hold a single hearing. Private capital builds first. Adoption becomes default. Default becomes dependence. By the time the community even gets a chance to vote, the vote's already been rendered ceremonial. But the people are still packing these town halls because they understand exactly what's being decided without them. Saying no is the first act of agency. 💚

Something feels off online. One post gets thousands of views, but the replies feel hollow. Another post makes the same point and gets no visibility at all. Sometimes it's hard to tell if this thing is even on. And this week, the numbers caught up to the feeling: Cloudflare’s CEO said bots have surpassed humans in web traffic for the first time. Being human is no longer the default in a place that meaningfully shapes our lives. The most valuable thing now might be rebuilding our places, so presence feels trustworthy and we can know what's real again.

Just for funsies, I just revived the OG @gitcoin Avatar Builder - mix-and-match your likeness from 937k free permutations. Pick a style, swap parts, recolor, download your PNG. No wallet, no signup. avatar.gitcoin.co/

Four companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta – are projected to spend ~$700B on AI infrastructure this year, close to double what they spent in 2025. Whoever owns the infrastructure sets the rules everyone else has to build around – and when the frontier AI compute layer sits inside four balance sheets, the rest of us are building on borrowed ground. Power concentration this fast is hard to see when it's happening. Trying to name it anyway is the first step toward building a different path.

You’ve spent 15 years contributing open source code. Now, to stay employable, you rent your capability back from companies that trained their models on your work. Just so you can keep pace. This week, Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 alongside workflows that can run hundreds of agents in parallel. They can write, refactor, and debug across entire codebases – because they were trained on ours. The commons became the input. The API became the gate. And the people who laid the foundation are now being forced to subscribe.

We ask Claude to draft apologies before we've internalized what we've done wrong. We ask ChatGPT to edit our emotions into a response that protects us from being known. Someone asks us a question, and our first instinct is to ask Gemini to answer for us. We used to hold human problems in our heads for hours, days, years – but now we offload them in minutes to intelligence that doesn't feel. It's not that AI is inherently bad, it's that the dependency curve is subtle – and what we're starting to outsource to machines is the intricate work of knowing who we are. We need to build a different path. 💚

Our phones know where we sleep, what we search for at 2am, and who we stop talking to. We're forced to subscribe to our toothbrushes. Our lawnmowers. Our refrigerators. Our cars. Our feeds know our anxieties, our preferences, and our deepest convictions. And all of this data – this intimate record of our lived experiences – somehow doesn’t even belong to us. Worse: it isn’t being used to make our lives better. It’s being used to make someone else richer at our expense. We need tech that protects us as aggressively as today’s platforms extract from us. And those builders need funding. 💚

AI isn't replacing jobs one at a time, it’s collapsing the apprenticeship layer. Associate research. Junior design. Baseline code. Entry-level analysis. The first rungs of entire career ladders are being erased – while politicians package it into campaign language and CEOs translate it into margin. But people don’t need abstractions after their world's been pulled out from under them. They need a bridge. 💚

Banks are saying it plainly: adapt, or be replaced as "lower-value human capital." This is what it looks like when the social contract dissolves. The response has to be bigger than policy. Regulation alone can’t fix a logic that sees people as diminishing returns. We need to rebuild the system – so technology serves the public, and people remain the point. 💚

Meta cut 8,000 jobs today. More than 140,000 tech workers laid off this year. And it's only May. Meanwhile: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are projected to spend $725B on AI infrastructure this year. The money isn’t gone. It moved. From payroll to compute. From people to GPUs. So where does the talent go? Not the executives with runway. The engineers, designers, and researchers being replaced by the very systems they brought to life. They still have skills. They still want to build. What they don’t have is a pathway beyond the machine that discarded them. That’s a gap we think matters. 💚

Maybe AI isn't breaking the value function, but exposing how broken it already was. > Your job's replaced by a $20/mo agent. > Your child's tutor doesn't need sleep. > Your doctor competes with a prompt. None of that's a failure of AI, it's a system working as designed: maximized throughput, minimized cost. Except the cost being minimized is us. Displacement matters. Regulation matters. UBI matters. But they're all downstream of a deeper question: is the system we trust to defend human prosperity still defending humans at all?

Something's breaking and we all feel it. > Our friends are shipping 10 apps a week but no one has steady income. > The S&P's at all-time highs but no one can afford gas. > Less than 10 companies own the future. The system's still running, but it's stopped producing the thing it was supposed to produce: shared prosperity in return for inputted effort. That's a value function problem. And if the value function's broken, the next best step is funding the builders of what comes next. 💚

Dune Analytics laid off 25% of its team. The reason? "Teams and agents can now build dashboards and workflows without needing to know anything about SQL" In 2026, the pattern is clear: Block, 40% Gemini, 30% BILL, 30% Algorand, 25% Upwork, 25% Cloudflare, 20% Coinbase, 14% Meta, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft account for tens of thousands more. 128,000 tech workers have been laid off since January, and all for one shared reason: AI is making teams smaller. This isn't a downturn. It's a restructuring. And the institutions doing the restructuring aren't building much for the people they're leaving behind. But we can. That's the work that public goods funding exists to do. 💚

Gitcoin and Octant: funding, grants, and are we bringing public goods back? x.com/i/broadcasts/1wxWjazRv…

How do you fund what matters without drawing down the treasury every cycle? Yield-powered funding with @OctantApp 🤝 Join @owocki @vpabundance and @arlery tomorrow at 1pm EDT to learn how keeping principal intact helps compound public goods impact with every round. 💚

AI's accelerating faster than the systems built to support us. 🪪 Identity 💸 Income 🧭 Information 🏗️ Infrastructure And when old systems stop working, capital starts flowing differently. The question now is whether we keep funding one-off interventions, or build funding systems to sustain what comes next. 💚 🔗 ↓ gitcoin.co/research/structur…

ICYMI: public goods funding is sooo back

Capitalism can price a barrel of oil, but not a stable climate. It can price a software license, but not the open source library it depends on. It can price an hour of labor, but not a year of parenting. What we call externalities are only external to the accounting system: they’re the substrate every market depends on, even when markets structurally can’t see them. But a new economy is being compiled – one that can finally account for this substrate. One block at a time ↓ gitcoin.co/research/post-cap…