Burnout is a pervasive issue that can be damaging to individuals and costly to organizations. As Fast Company has reported previously, 82% of workers feel at risk for burnout and could be costing companies an average of $21,000 per year in lost productivity.
And while theres no shortage of advice about how to prevent burnout, prevention isnt always a level playing field. Here are some situations that may leave you more prone to burnout than others:
1. If youre in the wrong work environment
Kandi Wiens, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the universitys masters in medical education program, says that some people may be more at risk for burnout than othersespecially those who are working in environments that arent compatible with their personality or temperament.
Wiens, author of Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Relationships at Work, says that burnout, especially in the workplace, ultimately comes down to a misalignment, or sometimes referred to as a mismatch, between someone’s personality or temperament and the environment that they are in.
So if you are an extrovert and were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, that might have led to burnout, while your more introverted colleagues may have thrived. If youre curious and open-minded and your workplace shuts down that kind of inquiry or experimentation, you may burn out faster.
Clues that you might be in the wrong work environment include feeling resistance to the companys work style or ideas. Wiens suggests people pay attention to that resistance and check themselves. Practice vocalizing your concerns about that resistance with someone you really trust. What would that look like, and how can you do that in a way that is healthy for you? she says.
2. If youre prone to fawning
Those who are constantly overextending themselves in an effort to please others in the workplace and are unable to set healthy boundaries are fawners, says clinical psychologist Ingrid Clayton, author of Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselvesand How to Find Our Way Back. This chronic people-pleasing is a hybrid response to trauma, Clayton says, noting that its an alternative to traditional fight, flight, or freeze responses. Its this hyper-attunement and managing other peopleappeasing other people in a hyperarousal kind of way, she says. But its also hypoarousal, where there is a disconnect from ourselves, so we dont know were fawning.
In her book, Clayton cites the example of a Harvard-educated law firm partner who was suffering signs of burnout. Through working with him, she helped him realize that the external validation he was seeking, as well as his inability to set boundaries, was leading to burnout. Such extreme people-pleasing can cause us to overwork and take on too much, ultimately leading to burnout.
Our worth is tied to these external markers rather than a connection with ourselves, Clayton explains. So, burnout is not just about outputthe exhaustion of overdoingbut our loss of autonomy, authenticity, and knowing who we are at all. This is survival mode, and we are not meant to live there 24/7. Something has to give.
3. If you lack self-awareness and self-advocacy skills
When youre encountering challenges in the workplace, whether theyre related to the culture being out of alignment with your personality and traits, or if youre slipping into people-pleasing behavior, advocating for yourself is an important part of burnout protection. However, Wiens says that self-awareness is essential to understanding the issues that are causing friction with your personality or temperament and then being able to address them.
Once you identify the issue, you can begin to take steps to mitigate it. For example, if youre isolated and extroverted, you can purposefully design other ways to get the interaction you need. If your creativity is being stifled, you may be able to find other outlets for it.
Wiens suggests thinking of it this way: What is it in the environment that is a mismatch or misalignment with that thing that is triggered in me, and then what can I do to either change it or change the way I think about [it]? She notes that people who lack self-awareness and the ability to examine their feelings face a fundamental hurdle in addressing the issues that could lead to burnout.
Clayton notes that if youre unable to advocate for yourselfincluding asking for what you need and setting boundaries when necessaryyou may be more prone to burnout.
Fighting burnout
The good news, Clayton says, is that boundary-setting can be practiced and built like a muscle. Start by asking for what you need when the stakes are lowin a restaurant order, for exampleto get in the habit. Some people can kind of laugh this off if they don’t have this experience, but it’s very real that if you don’t have an experience of speaking up or setting a boundary where it felt safe and it was successful, you have to start to build that experience, she says.
While several factors may contribute to burnout, these three issues may accelerate it. However, through awareness and practice in mitigating these factors, workers can find a measure of protection from a pervasive malady.
Artists and cultural workers are falling through the cracks of our economy at a time when their work has never been more needed in society. Their ability to exist and thrive is threatened by the cost of living and housing affordability crisis, our increasingly precarious economy, and cuts to grant funding under the new administration.
Many exist in a structural grey area between independent gig workers and small business owners. Their work is often episodic, making them easily left out of safety net programs like unemployment and healthcarethis is especially true for artists from historically marginalized communities.
To address these challenges, we need new systems and solutions to increase economic equity and ensure that our communities have access to creativity and culture. One such area weve seen a wave of interest and experimentation around the potential of in recent years is guaranteed income.
What is guaranteed income? It refers to unrestricted recurring cash payments that people can use however they see fit to cover their basic needs and reach their personal and professional goals. Guaranteed income programs can be focused geographically on specific cities, on specific communitiesfor example young people, entrepreneurs, or parentsor a mix of both.
Springboard Executive Director Laura Zabel announces Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists Expansion, 2025. [Photo: Thai Phan-Quang /courtesy Springboard for the Arts]
At Springboard for the Arts, weve been delivering one of the longest running guaranteed income programs in the country since 2021, focusing on both urban and rural artists and creative workers in Minnesota. Our 100 recipients to date include painters, sculptors, hiphop artists, singers, composers, teaching artists, performers, and writers who are receiving $500 a month over a five-year period.
This has given us the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learned and what insights we can offer to others thinking about doing this work.
Artwork by Alicia Thao, Artists Respond: People, Place, and Prosperity Cohort Member. [Image: courtesy Springboard for the Arts]
Adapt each program to the historical, cultural, and economic extractions in that community
At its best and most effective, guaranteed income is a tool for justice and repair by supporting populations who have been exploited by social, cultural, and economic systems in America. These programs should be tailored to a communitys needs by considering the connection points between the economics, culture, and physical design of our cities and the impact of policy and planning harms from the past.
Both cities and rural places bear the generational impact of economies based on the extraction of natural or cultural resources including redlining, land theft, the interstate highway system, and placement of industrial infrastructure, like trash burners, that has caused generations of environmental harm and adverse health impacts. The results of these policy decisions fall disproportionately on American BIPOC communities and neighborhoods, particularly Native and Black communities.
Artists Respond Cohort Member Briuana Williams live drawing at Basic Income Week 2025. [Photo: Thai Phan-Quang /courtesy Springboard for the Arts]
For our work in Saint Paul, weve focused our efforts in Frogtown and Rondotwo neighborhoods that are culturally vibrant, resilient, and community oriented, yet that continue to be disproportionately impacted by historical disinvestment, discrimination, and extraction. Rondo, for example, is a historically Black neighborhood whose cultural and business corridor was destroyed in the 1950s and ’60s by highway construction, causing generational economic and cultural harm that residents deal with to this day.
Our rural work is focused in Otter Tail County, in West Central Minnesota. This community, like many rural areas across the U.S., is in the midst of economic transformation, including the loss of major employers, lack of affordable housing, and increase in predatory businesses like dollar stores and payday lending. Here, guaranteed income can be a tool for attracting and retaining the creative people these communities will need to imagine a different future.
The focus on artists and creative workers is rooted in the idea that, like caregiving and community work, cultural work is a form of labor that communities depend on to be healthy but is not adequately valued by our current economy.
Artists Talk in rural Minnesota by Kandace Creel Falcón. [Photo: Brittanni Smith/courtesy Springboard for the Arts]
Use artists to help change the narrative about guaranteed income programs
While the idea of guaranteed income is gaining traction across the country, there are still embedded cultural and political beliefs that limit how far economic justice policy change can go. These are often harmful tropes like: Do people deserve it? How do they spend the money? Why dont they just get a job?
One of the most effective ways of countering these questions is for people to experience the stories of these programs on a human level, which can transform pervasive narratives about inequality and poverty into belief systems of belonging, deservedness, and inherent selfworth. In this way, artistsparticularly those participating in guaranteed income programs and who are locally rooted in their communitieshave a unique role to play in guiding and delivering a narrative shift around guaranteed income.
With this in mind, we created a project within our wider guaranteed income work, collaborating with a cohort of artists on Artists Respond: People, Place, and Prosperity. In this program, artists created public projects highlighting the root causes that lead to the need for guaranteed income, and its impact on families and communities. (These projects were supported separately and outside of artists’ participation as guaranteed income recipients.)
Guaranteed Income is the G.O.A.T billboard by Kandace Creel Falcón. [Photo: Brittanni Smith/courtesy Springboard for the Arts]
Artists have designed projects that range from podcasts and coloring books, to postcards, a public installation, and a collaborative performance/dance meditation made available on YouTube, all of which use messages that are reflective of their local communities. A billboard on rural Highway 210 by artist Kandace Creel Falcón looked at guaranteed incomes connection to rural values, with the message In Rural We Tend to the Herd as a way to root messaging in the collective values of that community and counter individualistic narratives that attempt to malign safety net programs.
Artist and GI Pilot participant Mickey Breeze speaks during Basic Income Week at Springboard for the Arts, 2025. [Photo: Thai Phan-Quang /courtesy Springboard for the Arts]
Cross-sector investment and collaboration are key
Our original pilot was a cross-sector partnershipdesigned in collaboration with the City of Saint Pauls Peoples Prosperity Pilot guaranteed income program and supported by local and national funders including the McKnight, Bush, Surdna, and Ford Foundations. We recently announced the expansion of this work, which includes extending the Saint Paul pilot and adding additional participants to the pilot in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, totaling 100 artists across both locations and committing to five years.
The majority of the pilots taking place across America have been 12 to 18 months, in part because that’s the amount of time that cities were able to raise and access relief funds during the pandemic. These are a great start, but to have the kind of longevity that will allow us to make a meaningfulnot just temporaryimpact requires bringing more and different kinds of partners on board and moving from pilots to policy.
This is an area where philanthropy has an opportunity to be a true partner by seeding longer-term pilots in more geographies and by supporting advocacy and policy work.
Artists Respond Cohort Member Kashimana performs during Basic Income Week 2025. [Photo: Thai Phan-Quang /courtesy Springboard for the Arts]
Research and evidence matters
When it comes to expanding the reach and impact of guaranteed income, research and evidence matters. Groups like Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, led by Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, are integrating learning and research from local pilots into state and federal policy recommendations. Springboard for the Arts is working with the University of Pennsylvania Center for Guaranteed Income Research to collect data through community-led participatory research in both rural and urban locations, allowing us to understand whats working and how people are using these funds.
Emergent themes from this research are compelling, with monthly income contributing to general financial stability; participants’ ability to do longer term planning toward healthcare, savings, business ownership and housing; and increasing financial security so artists can generate creative work for their community and stay in their neighborhoods. This money is going toward rent and supplies but its also being put to everyday expenses like fixing a car so that an artist can get to their job or buying snow boots for their children.
Being able to point to these tangible impacts allows us to bring in more partners and more effectively advocate for policy. Even if it feels tedious, having a growing body of data will bolster all of our efforts for both individual programs and the movement as a whole.
The experience with our pilot has shown us that guaranteed income works as a tool for supporting both an individuals economic security and their ability to contribute to their communities in creative ways. As our economy becomes even more stratified, there is an urgent need to advocate for policy innovations, like guaranteed income, that offer more Americans the freedom to take care of their families and communities and imagine and build a better future.
The article was adapted from the chapter Artists as Allies in Economic Justice in the recently released Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning.
Email: Its one of the more evil of the necessary evils. We all spend a significant chunk of our days wading through messages, to the point that it can feel like a never-ending task. Save us, artificial intelligence!
The good news: AI is revolutionizing how we interact with our email. And the best part? Many AI email tools offer free tiers that are actually useful.
If you’re looking to supercharge your Gmail experience, reclaim your time, and take a bit of work out of your workflow, look no further.
Compose AI: Effortless email drafting
Ah, the dreaded blank email draft. Thanks to AI, its days are fortunately numbered.
The Compose AI extension integrates directly into your Gmail compose window and offers intelligent suggestions as you type.
Simply provide a few keywords or a brief description of what you want to say, and watch the AI craft a well-written draft for you.
Theres also a super handy one-click email-reply feature, which suggests quick replies based on the context of messages you receive.
The free version offers 1,500 AI-generated words per month, while premium plans unlock additional generations and access to more advanced writing styles. Paid plans start around $10 per month.
InboxPurge: Cut the clutter
An overflowing inbox can be a needless source of stress, but AI-powered extensions are stepping in to help you regain control.
InboxPurge offers a free plan focused on helping you declutter your Gmail.
It uses AI to identify and categorize emails and allows you to quickly unsubscribe from identified newsletters and delete or archive entire categories of messages.
InboxPurge offers 20 free cleanup actions each month, while premium plans start at $4 per month and unlock more advanced automation features. Theres also a onetime $5 plan that unlocks all features for a weekperfect for periodic binge-decluttering sessions.
Mailmeteor: Enhance email productivity
Mailmeteor is primarily a mail-merge tool, with a free plan that offers features for boosting your email productivity and organization.
Use it to send follow-up emails at the perfect time, even if you’re not online. With the free plan, you can run three campaigns concurrently and send 50 personalized emails each day to multiple recipients.
Paid plans start at $5 per month and unlock higher sending limits for mail merge, more detailed tracking features, the ability to personalize emails with more variables, and integrations with other tools.
Concisely: Summarize emails automatically
Don’t have time to read every lengthy email in detail? Neither does anybody else. Thats why AI-powered summarization tools are such lifesavers.
The free Concisely extension can quickly analyze long emails and provide you with a brief overview of the key points, boiled down to a single sentence.
Its especially useful for newsletters, reports, or lengthy discussions where you only need the core information. The extension is free at the moment, with no paid plans available.
Grammarly: Watch your tone
AI-powered tone analysis extensions can help you communicate more effectively. Grammarly has a free version that analyzes the tone of your messages to let you know how you might sound to the person on the other end.
There are lso built-in grammar-checking features, of course, which help you come across more clearly and professionally to your recipients.
The free version of Grammarly offers grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks, as well as basic tone detection, plus some limited AI text generation. Paid plans start at $12 per month and unlock more advanced tone suggestions, clarity-focused rewrites, vocabulary enhancement suggestions, and plagiarism detection.
In the UK, it is currently Dying Matters Awareness Week. Griefand the impact of death and lossis something that nearly all of us will experience at some point in our working lives. Despite this, many workplaces are not equipped to have these tricky conversations and are unsure how to best support their staff with their mental well-being while grieving. At This Can Happen, we conducted an in-depth, two-stage research project into how workplaces are supporting employees with griefthe Grief In The Workplace Reportand the findings are eye-opening.
We found that 87% of respondents with lived experience felt grief had impacted their mental well-being, yet 46% felt that they did not have enough time to grieve and 51% did not feel supported by their organization. This is a critical issue for managers and leaders in the workplace that is impacting not only employee mental well-being, but also the ability for staff to perform at work. In fact, 76% said since returning to work they had not received any communications from managers or leadership in relation to their grief, and 76% also said they felt their loss had affected their performance in their immediate return to work.
So, how can employers help? Here are five ways.
1. Break the taboo in speaking about grief and bereavement
These conversations should be led from the top-down to tackle stigma and build psychological safety in the workplace. This is the responsibility of both leadership and line managers. For example, if members of leadership have lived experience of grief and loss, consider how personal storytelling from these individuals could have a transformative impact on staff likelihood to share their own challenges. This could take the form of an internal blog, a panel discussion, or even an update in a company meeting. Line managers can then pick up on this note and continue these conversations in catch-ups with line reports, encouraging open and honest conversation about mental well-being to build trust, so that employees know that they can immediately go to their manager when they need support.
2. Put the right support in place
Providing the right resourcesand ensuring that staff know where to find themis crucial. Our research shows that this is currently an area in which businesses are struggling, with 37% of respondents unsure about what resources were currently available to support them with grief. Make sure that you have a comprehensive Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) in place, which is a confidential service that supports staffand sometimes their family memberswith their health, including counseling, referrals, and expert advice. Consider creating worksheets with tips and advice about living through bereavement, along with helpful links that employees might want to explore for further reading or conversations. Finally, ensure that line managers are fully trained in having these conversations in the workplace, and understanding what resources your organization has in place, so that they can signpost staff correctly and efficiently.
3. Be open, empathetic, and human in your approach
This might sound like an obvious one, but its not; so many leaders and managers approach grief and bereavement from a policy-led perspective, or avoid the conversation altogether because they are afraid of saying what could be perceived as the “wrong thing.” Some 64% of respondents in our research had not heard their managers talking openly about bereavement. Take the time to understand what employees are thinking and feeling in terms of their grief, and what they need right nowkeeping in mind that grief is not one linear path forward, but rather a journey thats filled with peaks and troughs over time. This can be heightened around key moments such as anniversaries and birthdays. Keep the lines of communication open to understand what employees need at any given moment, and how you as an employer can really make a tangible impact in the support you offer.
4. Give employees experiencing grief both space and flexibility at work
Make sure employees who have uttered a loss know that you as an employer or line manager are there for them to speak to if they need it, but also give them the time and space to process their grief as needed. As much as you can within your workplace and industry, offer flexible working arrangements to bereaved staff. The thought of going into the office following a bereavement can sometimes be an overwhelming prospect; try to understand the impacts of grief in the short-, medium- and long-term, and understand where staff might benefit from flexible working arrangements.
5. Consider how you can provide ongoing support
For example, if resources allow, consider meeting with a psychologist to explain how to set up bereavement support, and ensure that this is baked into the heart of an organization, rather than sitting solely in a policy. From here, speak to staff and understand if theres anything further that they would like to set up from a grassroots perspective. A lot of powerful work that we have seen in this space has been created and run organically by employeeslunch-and-learn sessions on lived experience with grief or quarterly drop-in “grief cafés,” for instance.
These are all thought-starters on how best to support employees experiencing grief. The most important thing that you can do as a leader or manager is to be kind, empathetic and understanding to the challenges that these team members are facing, and listen with an open ear around how best to support them. Youll soon see the benefits of this, not just on employee mental well-being, but in terms of presenteeism and productivity as well.
Getting an email in the mid-90s was kind of an eventsomewhere between hearing an unexpected knock at the door and walking into your own surprise party. The white-hot novelty of electronic mail is preserved in amber by a ridiculous 1994 film: reverse sexual-harassment thriller Disclosure. It opens with a little girl perusing what was once known as a family computer before casually shouting, Daaaad, you got an email! Her announcement is as much for the benefit of 1994 viewers as it is for Michael Douglass character, an executive in the Seattle tech scene, letting them know theyre witnessing their imminent future.
[Photo: MGM]
At that point, the majority of Americans had never seen an email. According to a contemporary Pew Research poll, 42% had never even heard of the internet. Still, the early 90s thrummed with the propulsive drum line of digital revolution. The internet had existed in more esoteric forms for ages, but now America Online had terraformed it for normies, and Netscapes landmark IPO in 1995 began fueling the frenzy of the dot-com boom. Things changed fast, and The Net and Hackers dragged online culture center stage.
Released as summer bookends, The Net stars Sandra Bullock as a tech worker whose identity is stolen, while Hackers, featuring Angelina Jolie in her first major role, follows a squad of elite high school coders as they get caught up in a corporate conspiracy. Looking back now on the flag-planting internet movies of 1995, its incredible how well they predicted the possibilities and horrors on the horizon. Fast Company talked to the filmmakers behind both about all thats changed in the 30 years since.
[Photo: Sony Pictures]
Neither 90s movie was a blockbuster, exactly. The Net proved a modest success, earning $110 million worldwide and spawning a short-lived TV adaptation a few years later, while Hackers flopped, making back less than half of its reported $20 million budget. Both gained long tails of notoriety and cult-classic status, however, in part for having depicted the internet on-screen at the precise moment most filmgoers were discovering it at home.
The concept of connectivity had, of course, graced movie theaters before. Matthew Broderick plays a crafty teen who tweaks his high school computer system from home in both 1983s WarGames and again three years later in Ferris Buellers Day Off. A ragtag team of techies spends the entire run time of 1992s hacking romp, Sneakers, spelunking in a shadow realm of digital information. As technology rapidly evolved, though, and 90s news anchors began talking about chat rooms and using terms like cyberspace, it had to evolve in pop culture as well.
[Photo: TriStar Pictures]
Several studio releases from 1995 were lumped together as internet movies, with critics cross-referencing them in reviews. Among them were Virtuosity, in which Russell Crowe plays a computer-generated killer, and Johnny Mnemonic, which is mostly remembered as the cyberpunk action flick Keanu Reeves made before The Matrix. Both are set in the speculative sci-fi future1999 for Virtuosity, 2021 for Johnny Mnemonicwhile paranoid thriller The Net and teen comedy Hackers are dialed into reality on the ground and online.
At that point, no one had yet to really make a movie that was anywhere in that world, says Jeff Kleeman, the executive producer who oversaw the development of Hackers. Part of the reason I was excited about it was I felt like, for some reason, nobody is doing this. And I just thought, somebody ultimately is going to do this and I hope it’s me.”
“It was slow, and then very fast”
Before making Hackers, Kleeman didnt quite understand all the hype about the internet. He could easily grasp its significance for global businesses and governments, but on a personal level, he hadnt found many use cases. Still, he had absolute faith in the allure of a project about computer-savvy teenagers making digital mayhem. As he learned from Secret Service agents while researching the movie, teenagers at the time understood the internet better than anybody.
Kleeman shepherded Hackers practically from its inception. It started when a friend, an artist named Rafael Moreau, confided that hed lately been tagging along with an elite hacking crew known as the Legion of Doom, and he was thinking of writing a movie based on them. Kleeman was skeptical (film executives generally do not want to field pitches from novice writer pals), but he agreed to take a look at the screenplay, should one ever materialize. He was blown away by what Moreau eventually delivered.
The first draft of Hackers had a technical authenticity absorbed from its primary sources, and it pulsed with kinetic energy. Equally impressive, the dialogue read like it came from actual human teenagers. Kleeman first attempted to put the film into production at Francis Ford Copolas American Zoetrope before succeeding years later at United Artists.
Meanwhile, the film that would come to be called The Net originally had very little to do with going online. It started instead as a project about résumé-tampering.
Producer Irwin Winkler had read a buzzy spec script called The Game, which David Fincher would go on to direct, and wanted to meet its writers. The project he had in mind for them centered on a woman who hires a hacker to fake her résumé so she can land a job at a major advertising firm, only to end up with the hacker becoming obsessed with her. (Fatal Attraction with some glimmerings of high-tech in the background is how one of The Nets writers, Mike Ferris, describes it.)
The in-demand duo took on the gig, executives approved their outline, and they churned out a draft. Nobody involved with the project was impressed by what they turned in, including the scribes themselves. By the time they embarked on the next draft, though, writer John Brancato had read a book on the topic of identity theft, and it sparked some ideas.
It was a book about the possibility of a digital shadow and how the world could fuck with it, Brancato says. And that seemed like an interesting thing.
The writing pair seized on a scene that took place near the end of their first draftwhen the hacker starts erasing the protagonists credit history and banking dataand decided to make it the engine of the movie. The story would now focus on a computer expert whose entire life is being expunged online, forcing her to figure out why and reclaim her identity. The executives were thrilled. Their résumé-tampering project had morphed into a movie steeped in the technology that was defining the era in real time.
During production is when more of the hype about the internet really started rolling out, Brancato says. The awareness of it was slow, and then very fast.
The most infamous delivery order in film history
While Disclosure trumpeted the glorious future of normalized email the previous year, Hackers and The Net showed 90s viewers what else might be possible online.
During an early scene in Hackers, Jonny Lee Millers character, Dade Murphy, digitally breaks into a TV station, preempting a right-wing talk show to put on an episode of The Outer Limits. Through a 2025 lens, it seems bizarre that hed even think to do such a thing. Anyone wanting to watch The Outer Limits, or any TV show ever, can now easily do so with minimal keystrokes. To the average viewer in the 90s, however, what Murphy does is essentially sorcery.
The Net has some similarly dated 90s tech-flexing. Its opening moments follow systems analyst Angela Bennett, played by Bullock, as she goes about a flurry of online activity. Viewers watch her talk to some pals in a chat room (ooh!), purchase plane tickets right from her computer (ahh!), and in perhaps the most infamous food delivery in film history, order pizza online.
Although it was considered state-of-the-art in a pre-Dominos Pizza Tracker era, this scene quickly curdles into kitsch. I’m sure any kid watching now would be like, Why are we looking at that? Ferris says of the moment.
Other aspects of the films tech turned out to be more prescient. Bullocks character works on her laptop at the beach, prefiguring the remote-work eraeven if she does wonder aloud, Where can I hook up my modem? (Wi-Fi would not be invented for another three years.) Dial-up internet took 30 seconds to connect in 1995, but Bullocks character logs on at a speed much closer to present-day broadband internet. The quickness was meant to spare viewers from the full-length screeching sound of modems meeting up, according to Brancato, but some viewers still complained about the lack of realism.
One thing thats aged well about both movies is what isnt in them: virtual reality.
At the time, hype around VR ran parallel to internet evangelism in the mid-90s. Both technologies appeared on the verge of becoming equally ubiquitous in the American future. Hollywood had already called its shot, making VR central to the plot of several sci-fi films, including 1992s The Lawnmower Man, 1994s Brainscan, and 1995s Strange Days and Virtuosity. The worst offender may have been the more down-to-earth Disclosure, which somehow went all in on the idea of office workers donning VR headsets to find files within their computers. To their credit, The Net avoids VR entirely while only the try-hard villain in Hackers, played by Fisher Stevens, is briefly glimpsed wearing those gogglesand hes meant to look like a huge dork while doing so.
Our whole lives are on the computer
Beyond showcasing some technological possibilities newly on offer, the early internet movies of the 90s also flicked at the broader societal shifts they representedfor better and worse.
Our whole lives are on the computer, Bullocks character says at one point in The Net. It might as well have been the tagline for the film. Although its since become self-evident, nascent online dwellers of the 90s may not have understood just how much sensitive data about them was floating around in the ether, let alone the fluid nature of that data and the real-world consequences attached to changing it.
Bullocks character spends a large chunk of the movie trying to convince various authority figures shes actually systems analyst Angela Bennett, even though all online records now indicate shes hardened criminal Ruth Marx. This real-world editing is a far cry from Ferris Bueller changing the number of school absences hes incurred in a semester. It might be considered almost tame by todays standards, though, since it affects only one person.
The Net seems to anticipate a catastrophic problem that has only metastasized over the past decade: the degradation of objective truth. In 2025, between AI deepfakes and other forms of digital disinformation, its now harder than ever to distinguish whats real from what isnt.
That’s what was so scary about the entire thing, even back then, Brancato says. The more you consign reality to this machine, the more manipulable it is.
Hackers, however, demonstrated the bright side of manipulating reality on- and offline.
Although the film never addresses their sexuality explicitly, Matthew Lillards character, who goes by Cereal (as in Cereal Killer), and Renoly Santiagos character, who answers to Phreak, are bth stylized with a queer-coded, gender-fluid aesthetic. Lillards looklong, braided pigtails, eye makeup, and tight crop topswas especially audacious for a male high school student in a mainstream movie from 1995. As Kleeman confirms, these style choices are meant to underline the liberating quality of the internet; the way it thrust its users into a choose-your-own-adventure mode of identity.
For the first time that I know of, in the history of humanity, if you were a high school kid, you could actually have a second life online, he says. And what you did with that identity in terms of gender, in terms of attitude or personality, was completely up for grabs.
As for the paranoia around data privacy radiating off both 90s films, it now seems nearly as quaint as ordering pizza from Pizza.net.
I would’ve been up in arms 10 or 15 years ago about Amazon or Apple listening through our devices, Ferris says. And now everyone’s just like, Well, yeah, sure they do. I mean, what are you gonna do? Throw away your phone? Throw away your computer?’ I’m not as outraged about that stuff as I feel like I should be.
The escape you cant escape
As much as the earliest internet movies seemed to peer into the future, the iPhones emergence is what rendered them hopelessly stuck in the past.
Hackers and The Net present computers as rabbit holes, transporting users into a weird, wild online wonderland. Everything changed once a tiny, high-speed computer was suddenly within arms reach at all waking hours. The internet ceased being a mysterious place people sometimes visited, and instead became an omnipresent layer on top of the real world, no entry required.
As much as Hackers made the internet feel dynamicdepicting it as a vivid cityscape of circuitry, with skyscraper-like database towersit was still a world that needed to be approached from a static location. Like all early internet movies, Hackers and The Net now suffer from the fact that a lot of their action features a person seated at a computer, typing really hard. Once most people had smartphones, filmmakers started to simply overlay a user interface on-screen. Characters could now move around physically as their online activity moved the plot forward.
Of course, the invention of the iPhone may have hurt all movies, not just the retro internet ones from the 90s. Once most modern movie characters had instant access to all information in recorded history, it became too easy for them to solve juicy cinematic problems. They now either have to lose Wi-Fi access somehow, or go back in time. Perhaps the reason directors like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson seem to make only period pieces these days is so they can create movies devoid of the ever-present internet.
While going online was once a tantalizing escape from reality, a lot of people now seem to fantasize instead about escaping from the internet. In that sense, The Net did accurately predict the future. It ends with Sandra Bullock literally going outside and touching grass.
President Trump’s proposed baby bonus would have come in really handy at chez Guy Birken 15 years ago. Money was a bit of an issue for my family when we welcomed our first child in 2010. We’d moved to Indiana from Ohio in June of that year so my husband could take a higher paying job. Id left my own job as a high school English teacher. Our baby was born in late August, making it impossible to find a teaching job in our new town.
Our timing was impeccable that year. We also unwittingly put our Ohio house on the market one month after the federal first-time homebuyer credit expired, bought a house in Indiana right away, and paid two mortgages for 11 months until the old house sold.
As my husband likes to say, in 2010 we went from two incomes to one, from one mortgage to two, and from two people to three. (And yes, I am now considered a financial expert.)
But would a $5,000 baby bonus really help new parents on a national scale? Or is it just Trumps transactional solution to falling birth rates?
In honor of Mothers Day, lets look at the best ways to support new parents, working mothers, and our nations children. And it doesnt include a onetime cash payment.
Paying for a baby boom
The United States sees over 3.6 million births each year. If the government were to go forward with Trump’s $5,000 baby bonus proposal, Uncle Sam would be handing out over $18.3 billion to new mothers every year. While that would only be 0.019% of the $9.7 trillion federal budgetbasically, a rounding errorits important to compare that amount to other types of spending that affect American families.
Federal Agency2024 Spending BudgetDepartment of Health and Human Services (HHS)$2.5 trillionSocial Security Administration (SSA)$1.6 trillionDepartment of Education (ED)$228.9 billionDepartment of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)$88.2 billionDepartment of Labor (DOL)$66.2 billionConsumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)$167 million
$18.3 billion in annual baby bonuses may represent a tiny portion of the governments total budget, but that spending could be a relatively significant percentage of each of these departments budgets. Specifically, $18.3 would equal
0.73% of the HHS budget
1.1% of the SSA budget
7.99% of the ED budget
20.7% of the HUD budget
27.6% of the DOL budget
10,958% of the CPSC budget
Allocating that kind of funding to existing programs could potentially improve maternal and infant health, provide ongoing financial benefits, support public education, increase access to affordable housing, support employment goals, or protect children from unsafe products. Obviously, $18.3 billion cant do all of those things at once, but increasing the budgets of one or several of these departments may be a better use of the money.
Make motherhood feasible again
As helpful as five grand might be for any one family, the Trump baby bonus is the federal policy version of handing your wife a sawbuck the day after Mothers Day and telling her to buy herself something nice. Its not giving her what she needs or wantsand feels a little insulting, to boot.
American mothers are clamoring for help with the impossible financial and logistical challenges of raising a family in this country. Specifically, new parents need access to paid family leave and childcare. Spending federal money on these programs will do more to improve mothers lives than a one-time $5,000 payment.
Paid family leave
The United States is one of only seven countries without paid maternity leave. This means American women may have to choose between getting a paycheck and having a kid. While the Trump administration’s $5,000 baby bonus might help, the median weekly earnings for an American woman is $1,092which means the bonus would cover less than five weeks of leave.
Instituting a federal paid family and medical leave program could potentially encourage more births, since it could help solve the financial problem of affording parental leave.
In 2022, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a proposed federal paid family and medical leave program would cost about $200 billion for the 10-year period between 2022 and 2031. As it was written, the program would allow eligible workers to take up to four weeks of paid leave after the birth or adoption of a child. Benefits would equal a portion of the workers pre-leave wages and would be paid by the federal government.
The CBO anticipated the program would significantly improve the mental and physical health of postpartum parentswhich would lead to increased employment and earnings. Although the four-week maximum leave time seems woefully inadequate, simply providing federal leave would make an enormous difference to a wide swath of American families.
Birth to kindergarten childcare
Returning to work after having a child is challenging (to say the least) without consistent and safe childcare. This is not nearly as simple as asking Nana and Pop-Pop to take care of the kids for free, especially considering grandparents are probably working, too. Nearly one out of every five Americans aged 65 or older is employed full-time.
And without free family options, childcare for young children is remarkably expensive. Anecdotally, every parent I know had a daycare bill that was higher than their monthly mortgage paymentand this is backed up by data from the Department of Labor, which found that American families spend between 8.9% and 16.0% of their median income on ful-day care for just one child.
The Biden-Harris administration worked to invest in childcare on a federal level, providing $24 billion in funding to childcare via the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP). The administration calculates that the onetime investment of $24 billion saved families $1,250 per child (representing a 10 percent reduction in childcare costs), increased the pay of childcare workers, and increased the employment of mothers with young children by about 3 percentage pointsleading to womens prime-age labor force participation hitting its highest value on record.
This meant the benefits were greater than just the $1,250 in childcare savings enjoyed by young families. Childcare workers made more money, employers kept more of their staff, and families maintained their financial and employment stability.
Unfortunately, all of these improvements were lost after the ARP expired.
Happy Mothers Day! Heres five grand
America has a cultural expectation that mothers will pick up the slack when children, fathers, or society needs something that theyre not getting. That means a national conversation about supporting motherhood to the tune of $5,000 a pop might feel like progress, even if its misguided. But a baby bonus feels a little like the exaggerated social media praise often heaped on mothersa showy expression of appreciation that requires little effort.
The truth is that encouraging more people to consider motherhood isnt a tough proposition if you provide the support they needjust as making Mom happy on Mothers Day isnt difficult if you listen to what she actually wants.
Offering actual support is harder than throwing money at the problem, but its the only path to a real solution.
Every year brings its own unique challenges for California farmers: water shortages, fires, finding laborers to do the work, bureaucrats in Sacramento adding new requirements and fees, and more. But the second term of President Donald Trump has made this year very different.
As part of deep cuts across much of the government, Trump’s administration chopped $1 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture almost without warning. This led to widespread financial pain that affected already struggling farmers and left hungry patrons of food banks in many parts of the country desperate for other sources of healthy food.
On February 28, California officials warned farmers who had grown food for schools and food banks that there was funding only for work done up to January 19, despite the fact that farmers had submitted invoices for work and harvests past that date.
California farmers quickly organized a phone call and email campaign over the span of seven days in early March to demand the attention of elected representatives and answers from federal officials. By March 7, their efforts were successful: They would receive pay for the fall and for harvests for the rest of this year. But their success was overshadowed by news that the program would stop at the end of 2025.
For Bryce Loewen, a farmer who co-owns Blossom Bluff Orchards in Fresno County, the first freeze in funding meant that the USDA failed to hand over more than $30,000 that it owed the business for growing food to help feed Californians who could not afford it.
There isnt really a good time to get stiffed for your work. But during winter, the slowest season on the farm, theres downtime, and California farmers like Loewen recently used that lull to fight to regain the money farmers were owed and help feed some of their most vulnerable neighbors.
A farmers instinct is to fix things, Loewen said. And thats what we did.
Loewens farm is in the small town of Parlier, California, which has a declining population of less than 15,000. On March 1, Loewen called federal officials to try to change their minds about the funding cut. Farming is a business of slim margins, and Loewen was trying to keep his farm from falling into debt, he said.
Loewen was just one of many farmers in California and around the country who called and emailed officials that day. They asked why they hadnt been paid, and they described the economic benefit of the USDA funds to small farms and public health services and to agencies that feed people in their own communities who are struggling.
Loewen left messages and wrote emails to Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno); Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture; and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York. Other farmers also contacted Rollins, their local representatives, and congressional and Senate leadership on both sides of the political aisle.
The impromptu campaign was somewhat successful. Six days later, the USDA agreed to pay farmers for their fall harvest and contracts for 2025, but not beyond.
The USDA did not respond to calls and emails from Capital & Main about why the cuts were made or why they were restored. Neither the USDA nor Rollins have publicly acknowledged hearing from farmers about the cuts.
In securing payments for slightly more than nine additional months, the farmers relative success might offer lessons for other groups targeted by government cuts as they seek to claw back some resources for crucial programs.
California may be world-famous for its beaches, Hollywood, and Big Tech, but many people dont realize that the states vast Central Valley supplies a quarter of all food to the United States. In the Golden State, agriculture is the backbone of many local economies, from the states southern frontier with Mexico all the way to its northern border with Oregon. This is especially true in the states agricultural heartland.
Yet many residents who live in what dust-bowl musician Woody Guthrie once referred to as the Pastures of Plenty cannot afford the fresh, locally grown food that surrounds them in the regions villages and towns. The Healthy Fresno County Community Dashboard, which publishes local health information, reported that 16% of the countys 1 million residents in 2022 were considered food insecure. Those rates were higher for the countys Black and Hispanic residents in comparison to their white peers.
Since 2006, the USDA has used the term food insecurity to describe the status that leads to weakness, illness, and harm to families who lack stable access to food. It disproportionately affects lower-income groups in the state. Food insecurity includes the inability to afford a balanced diet, fear that a homes food supply wont last, or having to eat less because one cant afford to buy more food. An insecure food supply causes physical pangs of hunger in adults, as well as stress and depression, particularly in mothers. Limited food intake affects brain development in children, prompting stress among preschoolers and affecting a students ability to learn basic subjects such as math and writing.
In California, 9 of 20 adults with low incomes reported limited, uncertain, or inconsistent access to food in 2023, according to a California Health Interview Survey.
Loewens farm helps feed some struggling Californians with the help of money through a $400 million federal program called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. The California Department of Social Services distributes the funds across the state through a program called Farms Together.
Farmers werent the only ones to feel the pain of the USDA cuts between late February and March 11, said Paul Towers, executive director of Community Alliance With Family Farmers. His organization helps distribute food from small farms to food banks and school districts. During a two-week period, food banks didn’t receive any such food, which left people who rely on that food aid to scramble for something to eat.
Thats two weeks of lost income for farmers, Towers said. And two weeks of no food.
Nationwide, 18 million Americans were food insecure in 2023, according to the USDA. Most of those people live in rural counties such as Fresno County, according to Feeding America, a national network of food banks and pantrie.
By March 10, news of the cuts was spreading. The online agriculture and food policy news outlet Agri-Pulse warned in a headline: Trump administration canceling local food initiatives.
On March 11, Fox News highlighted the cuts to farmerswho voted disproportionately in favor of Trump during his presidential campaignsin a live interview with Rollins. Americas Newsroom anchor Bill Hemmer asked Rollins to justify the $1 billion cuts in food security aid to schools and food banks. Rollins offered conflicting responses.
The cuts were to pandemic-era food programs and were aimed at new and nonessential programs, she said.
Rollins said the programs cost had grown but didnt offer any evidence to back that up. The initial iteration of the local food purchasing assistance, the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, was a multibillion dollar pandemic food aid project started during Trumps first term. But Rollins didnt share that detail.
Speaking of other cuts made the day before the interview, she added that authorities had canceled more contracts on food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco; obviously thats different than the food programs in the schools, but it is really important.
The local food purchase agreement didnt, and still doesnt, favor food aid or food justice to trans people. It pays for farmers to grow food that goes to food banks and school districts.
Rollins didnt acknowledge that the cuts were overzealous or the harm that they might cause. As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes, and we will reconfigure. But right now, from what we are viewing, [the local food purchase assistance] program was nonessential. It was a new program, and it was an effort by the Left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that [was] not necessary, Rollins told Fox News.
On March 11, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers posted on its blog: The reinstatement of Farms Together is a victory worth celebrating. Through collective action, the voices of farmers and allies were heard, but the fight isnt over. Farms Together IS restoredthough only temporarily.
Our intent, Towers said, was to make sure Secretary Rollins heard directly from farmers that they were harmed by the cuts to these programs.
George B. Sánchez-Tello, Capital & Main
This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
Arianna Huffington, author, entrepreneur, and founder of The Huffington Post believes in one key to success above all else: getting enough sleep.
When I get eight hours, I feel ready to handle anything during the day without stress and without paying a heavy price in terms of my own health and my own mental well-being, Huffington, the author of The Sleep Revolution, told NBC.
Heres how sleep can lead to greater success and happiness for you:
Huffingtons Personal Journey With Sleep
Back in 2007, Huffington was constantly sacrificing sleep to work 18-hour days. Then, one morning, she woke up on the floor of her home office in a pool of her own blood. Shed passed out from exhaustion, breaking her cheekbone when she fell.
It was a pivotal moment that reshaped her views on success and well-being. Rather than measuring success in just money or power, Huffington now advocates for a third metric of success, which includes well-being, wisdom, and giving back.
Shes since written two books on the subjects and founded a new company, Thrive Global, which helps employers improve their workers lives.
Why is Sleep Essential for Success?
In her viral TED talk, Huffington discussed how sleep allows us to shut down our engines, refresh our brains, and go into every day operating at peak performance, which is foundational for productivity, creativity, and decision-making.
Science backs Huffingtons views. For example, one study showed that new neural connectionsthe pathways between neurons that allow our brains to functionare formed while sleeping. It also showed better performance outcomes from sleeping and training together rather than training more in place of sleep.
Studies have also linked inadequate sleep (whether thats extreme deprivation over a short period or slight deprivation over the long term) to worse reasoning, decision-making, and driving abilities, as well as mood swings, depression, and physical ailments like diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Arianna Huffingtons Top Tips for Better Sleep
Alongside championing the importance of sleep, Huffington has put out tons of advice on how to get enough of it through The Sleep Revolution and her Sleep Revolution Manifesto.
1. Create a bedtime ritual
Doing the same routine before bed each night will help signal to your body and brain that its almost time to sleep. Adding relaxing activities like a hot bath, a nice cup of decaffeinated tea, a good book, or a mediation session, will help even more.
2. Make your bedroom an ideal sleep space
Huffington advocates for keeping your bedroom cool (between 60 and 67 degrees), dark, and quiet. If possible, keep your smartphone out of your bedroom (or at least out of reach) and reserve the room for sex and sleeping only.
3. Avoid caffeine and electronic devices before bed
Huffington recommends cutting off caffeine around 2 p.m. and any electronic devices around 30 minutes before you lay down for the night. If you read in bed, use a traditional paper book or an e-reader without backlighting.
4. Wear dedicated pajamasnot workout gear
Wearing the same clothes to exercise and to sleep sends your body mixed signals.
5. Treat sleep as nonnegotiable
Rather than sacrificing sleep to spend time on other activities like work, social engagements, or recreational activities, Huffington says we should be doing the opposite. Schedule your life around getting enough sleep in the same way you plan sleep around your work schedule.
The Link Between Sleep, Happiness, and Mental Health
All the things that make life much harder are aggravated when youre sleep-deprived, Huffington said on The School of Greatness podcast. Youre more likely to dwell on your failures, fears, and anxieties or feel irritable and stressed.
By contrast, when you sleep enough, your brain gets the recovery time it needs, youre more clear-headed, emotionally level, and able to handle the challenges your job or life might throw at you. You also increase your daily opportunities to experience joy, which can improve your relationships and work performance.
Over time, all of these factors reduce your stress, make you more productive, and help you avoid burnout.
Debunking the Myths of Around Sleep
Work culture has a terrible tendency to glorify sleep deprivation. Theres the hustle mentality that says one should always be grinding. Theres also the sleep deprivation one-upmanship where people brag about how little sleep they get.
Today, so many of us fall into the trap of sacrificing sleep in the name of productivity, Huffington said. But in the U.S., inadequate sleep actually leads to 11 days of lost productivity per year per worker, collectively costing the U.S. economy more than $63 billion annually.
Prioritizing sleep is often associated with laziness, but making sure you begin every day at your full potential is actually a strategy for long-term success.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is enthusiastic about the companys pilot with Waymo. In Q1 prepared remarks, he said the launch in Austin has exceeded our expectations, noting that the 100 self-driving vehicles there were busier than 99% of the citys human drivers. The strong performance has Uber looking ahead to its next Waymo rollout in Atlanta.
But Waymo isnt Ubers only autonomous partner. Just hours before Khosrowshahis comments were released, Uber announced an expanded deal with WeRide, a global rival to Waymo. WeRides robotaxis will soon launch in 15 new cities outside the U.S. and China.
While Waymo may be Ubers marquee U.S. partner, the rideshare giant is making it clear it wont rely on just one self-driving tech provider.
Ubers expanding self-driving deals
In the United States, Waymo remains the dominant force in robotaxis, especially since Cruise has shuttered. Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are already operating in Austin and are set to launch in Atlanta. Waymos safety record and rider experience coupled with Ubers scale and reliability in the market have ensured that these vehicles are extremely busy, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi noted in his Q1 remarks.
But the Uber-Waymo relationship hasnt been without friction. When Waymo announced a Miami expansion without Uber in December, Ubers stock took a hit. In response, the company unveiled new American partnerships, first with Volkswagen in April and then with May Mobility in June. (Uber declined to comment for this story.)
Meanwhile, Ubers international self-driving investments are accelerating. Just ahead of Khosrowshahis remarks, the company announced an expanded partnership with WeRide, the Chinese robotaxi firm already operating with Uber in Abu Dhabi. The new agreement covers 15 additional citiesintentionally outside both the U.S. and Chinaand includes a $100 million investment.
The same week, Uber announced an expanded deal with Pony.ai, another Chinese autonomous vehicle company. While the agreement excludes operations in China and the U.S., it significantly broadens their collaboration across the Middle East. Just days earlier, Uber also announced a new partnership with Momenta for deployment across Europe.
To date, Uber has inked deals with 18 self-driving companies. Waymo may still be Ubers biggest U.S. bet, but globally, the ride-hailing giant is hedging those bets fast.
Who should lead the robotaxi revolution?
Not long ago, Uber was hoping to produce robotaxis, and not just commission them. The company invested over $1 billion into their own self-driving technology. But in 2020, it pulled the plug, selling its autonomous vehicle unit to Aurora, where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi now sits on the board.
Uber isnt alone among American companies that failed to crack autonomous driving. Lyft also abandoned its self-driving ambitions. Cruise, General Motors robotaxi division, effectively shut down after one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian about 20 feet. Tesla continues to hype its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, but Elon Musks promised robotaxi still hasnt arrived.
That leaves Waymo as the leadingif not the onlyAmerican contender in the robotaxi race. Meanwhile, Chinese firms like WeRide, Pony.ai, and Momenta are rapidly expanding. Uber is poised to play a major role in this growing global market, serving autonomous rides to its loyal user base. For now, Uber isnt picking just one horseits betting on the entire field.
When India banned TikTok in 2020, YouTube responded by launching a short-form video feature with a similar user experience in the country. Less than a year later, that feature rolled out globally as YouTube Shorts, which allows creators to post 180-second-long swipeable vertical content. Today, YouTube Shorts has roughly 1.5 billion users and receives an average of 70 billion daily views.
With TikToks future in limbo in the U.S.a much-delayed ban is set to take effect on June 19Shorts is hoping that TikToks audience of almost 2 billion people will see it as a compelling alternative. YouTube is already the second-most visited site in the world, and the platform has spent years building a strong creator ecosystem. YouTube Shorts product lead Todd Sherman came on the Most Innovative Companies Podcast to talk working with creators, tweaking the Shorts algorithm, and competing with TikTok.
It’s been five years since you launched YouTube Shorts in India. Why did you create the product, and why launch it in India first?
I worked at Twitter when we had Vine and I recognized it as the beginning of something. Even though Vine didn’t continue forward, and other apps took its place, none quite had the same vibe. At YouTube, we wanted to get into short-form video. We felt like it was going to give a whole new generation of creators a voice and would also be really fun to watch short videos between moments throughout the day. India was an important proving ground. Theres a long tail of Android devices there and a lot of them are lower-end. Theres a massive group of creative people [there], and it has a really big population, so we wanted to plant a stake in that market.
Around five years ago, as YouTube Shorts launched, TikTok took off in the Unites States. How did you think about that product as you were developing Shorts?
A lot of people started paying attention to short form video when TikTok started to get scale. [But] I had been paying attention to it since Vine, and pushing for us to make progress there even before TikTok was a mainstream name. It’s interesting to take inventory of how short-form video evolved. At first it was just squarish videos with no algorithm and a really basic camera where you just held your finger on the screen to record segments. Then Dubsmash and Musical.ly really embraced the remix of the sound. They added the audio pivot page where you could see all of the other videos that were using that sound, but there still really weren’t great algorithms. What [TikTok developer and eventual Musical.ly acquirer] ByteDance did is they were applying machine learning algorithms to short-form video in a way that none of the other ones had been. I think the most impressive thing about the rise of TikTok is really their algorithm and how effective they are at finding videos that you want to watch, [while] also supporting creator growth. There’s always two sides to the algorithm. It’s how easy is it to get started and [get viewers] inspired, but then also how good is it at serving viewer needs? That continues to be a really bright spot for them. Something that is a huge commitment for us is improving the algorithm over time.
Does the Shorts algorithm operate the same way as the longer YouTube one?
There’s many things that are different in short form because you watch so many more of them. So you approach the amount of diversity across hundreds of videos across different topics or creators differently than if youre serving people 10 or 15 videos a day that are longer form. In short form, you can proactively introduce people to new things more easily, because the cost of being wrong is a lot lower.
Do Shorts viewers often click through to watch longer videos from creators they like?
That’s one way that happens. We also try to understand these videos through technology. We try to know how videos are related, even if one is short or one is long. We feed these [videos] into what we call an embedding space that [has] a higher dimensional video understanding capability. And so that means a short video can sit in this spot [where] it shares space with longer videos. Because of that, we say to ourselves, here’s all the videos that you enjoy about training dogs, and maybe [some of them are] short videos. Because we have that understanding, we can start to recommend longer videos related to that.
Does that work across categories?
I like dance videos that are short. I might not actually longer dance videos. Longer ones tend to be more about choreography and I have zero hopes of ever dancing in any respectable way. So from a personalized point of view, I only like one and not the other, whereas for dog training or science videos, I may like both. So the algorithm is personalized.
Last year, Shorts went from being one-minute long to three-minutes long. Why did you make that decision?
We’re always listening to creators. Sometimes when people are telling a story, it just feels like they’re hitting against this wall. I would go to creator events and ask them what is on their wishlist. Especially amongst people that have this narrative-style storytelling where they’re scripting and there’s a dialogue, they were asking if they could get a little breathing room. It led us to say, we think that we can expand this while still preserving the shorter side of videos. Around a minute and 45 seconds-long, videos tends to be more narrative style, where you have beginning, middle, and end. We want all those stories to be told on YouTube.
You recently changed the way views are counted on the platform. Why is that?
On long-form YouTube, most engagement comes from people explicitly selecting a video. They’re tapping or they’re clicking and then they’re watching. The vast majority of engagement is explicit.
When we started auto-playing things, we asked ourselves, when should we count it as a view? Should it just be immediately? No, we think we should basically approximate it to be equivalent to when somebody clicked or tapped. So we started adding watch time thresholds. Then we inherited that for Shorts. But when we looked at Shorts and what people were telling us, they were telling us they expect it to start counting views [as soon as] they see the video. [We would] talk to new creators, and they’re like, I got zero viewsno one saw my video. Actually, that wasnt true. A lot of people liked their video, but no one watched the video up to the threshold that we define as a view.
Within short-form content, most engagement is not coming from explicitly selecting a specific video. It’s coming from people swiping in the feed. So it’s a bit of a redefinition of view. We made the decision [to count all views as views no matter the threshold] because the fundamentals of the product are that when people view your video, they’re just sort of swiping into it.
What are your conversations like with Shorts creators?Thescale of Shorts is now that we sort of have to segment creators to kind of talk about them. [Some] long-form creators are effectively production studios with teams.
When you think about how they like to use Shorts, they love it as either kind of a creative outlet to try something new. They use it as a testing ground for new ideas. And if something pops off there, then maybe they’ll go and invest 80 hours making a longer video.
Who are your favorite creators to follow?
I really like Nile Red. He’s this chemist. We watch a lot of his shorts in the living room because he does these little science experiments, and I have little kids. We recently watched one where he tried to make coffee end to end. I’ve also been getting into cooking videos. I don’t know how to cook well, but there’s something I love about watching people quickly prepare a meal. Ian Fujimoto has great storytelling and a great personality. Theres also Nick Suarez who has a channel The Nick of Time where they involve their family in internet trends.
