Tim O'Reilly talks about his new book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, and how tech is a positive force despite current issues
Steven Levy / Wired : Tweets: @backchnnl and @wired Tweets: Backchannel / @backchnnl : Tim O'Reilly thinks Jeff Bezos might actually make a decent president. http://www.wired.com/... @wired : “Financial markets are the first rogue AI.” http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Steven Levy's Backchannel interview lands a year after Wired's Obama–Ito conversation on AI and society, extending the magazine's running question of whether technology's trajectory is something done to us or chosen by us. O'Reilly's answer — that tech remains a positive force and 'it's up to us' — is the optimist pole of that argument, delivered via his new book 'WTF'.
The Bezos-for-president aside reads differently in hindsight: it foreshadows the tech-politics entanglement Wired kept covering, from the 2018 books arguing big tech grew by ducking regulation to the 2025 warning about tech leaders embracing Trump.
First-order effects
- O'Reilly gets a national platform to reframe the post-2016 tech backlash around agency rather than inevitability, with the 'financial markets are the first rogue AI' line giving the book's algorithmic-governance thesis its most quotable hook.
- The Bezos remark immediately politicizes Amazon's founder in print, pulling a business figure into the presidential-speculation conversation.
Second-order effects
- The book's optimism becomes a foil for the structural critique that follows: within a year, rival titles attribute big tech's power to regulatory evasion and labor squeezing rather than disruption, forcing the 'tech is good' camp to defend mechanisms, not just intentions.
- O'Reilly Media's own later writing on decentralization-recentralization cycles shows the publisher internalizing the critique, treating platform concentration as a recurring pattern rather than an aberration.
Third-order effects
- If the 'it's up to us' framing holds, the durable fight is over who steers algorithms — markets included — which is why the rogue-AI line keeps resurfacing as financial and political systems automate.
- The Bezos quip marks an early data point in Silicon Valley's drift from idealistic distance toward direct political power, the arc Wired traces through to its 2025 warning.
The trend: Tech commentary is splitting between agency-first optimism ('the future is up to us') and structural critique of how platforms actually accumulated power, with founder-politicians like Bezos sitting at the fault line.