Alan Shimel

Welcome to Judge Shimmy’s Silicon Valley Smackdown, the only courtroom […]

Anthropic, Google and SpaceX have all protected themselves with flexible agreements governing hundreds of thousands of GPUs. Boxtown, the historic Memphis community living beside the Colossus AI complex, has no comparable exit clause. Alan Shimel examines who controls the infrastructure, who captures its value and what the host community receives in return.

Decades ago, sitting in an undergraduate political theory seminar, I […]

Last year I wrote that artificial intelligence, together with social […]

There is a number making the rounds right now that […]

The AI buildout is the largest infrastructure bet in history. […]

As America turns 250, the country is pouring trillions into an Intelligence Grid that may prove as consequential as the railroads, the interstates and electrification itself. The open question is who it will serve.

Jennifer Harris named the symptom. Alan Shimel says the disease is bigger — AI isn’t just crowding out capital, it’s hollowing out the institutions capital used to sustain.

AI 2.0 is less about smarter models and more about economics. Satya Nadella’s comments signal a shift toward lower-cost AI, open source, enterprise control and intelligence that is affordable, trustworthy and widely deployable.

Alan reflects on Toy Story 5 and how traditional childhood imagination is being replaced by passive digital consumption, arguing that the true value of both toys and AI lies not in what they do, but in what they challenge us to create ourselves.