Lukas Levert

I'm proud to announce the opening of the Museum of the Human Web. I grew up with the internet. RuneScape, MSN, Club Penguin, Wikipedia, Funnyjunk, Reddit. I knew my slice of it well and assumed that was most of the story. It wasn't. The web I grew up on sat on top of decades of work by people I'd never heard of, building things that didn't have to exist and mostly weren't paid to. The web isn't a product. It's closer to an organism — something that grew, and is still growing, and has reshaped us as much as we've shaped it. It's part of the human condition now. AI is now part of that organism too, so this felt like the right time to look back and celebrate everything human about the web. Massive thank you to @travers00, @paraga, @vanlancker, @chrisfralic, Marc Weber at the Computer History Museum, @MarkGraham , @rogaos , @DylanAbruscato, @asimov_co, @problemlibrary, @yangyou, Phoebe Darling... and to everyone who handed us a story or an artifact and trusted us with it. Come see it IRL on May 8th: museum.parallel.ai

Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen (1940). An expressionist church built from six million handmade Danish bricks.

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views. “On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.” Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: nymag.visitlink.me/w6Bu9N

Today and tomorrow are the last two days to come see the @p0 Museum of the Human Web in San Francisco. Come by! 238 King Street, open 9a - 5p both days!

@carrawu Working with you is such a treat! We're incredibly lucky to have you, Carra. 🫶

My uber just pulled up

@jnnnthnn @p0 Thank you so much for coming by!

museum of the human web by @p0 is very cool, go visit it (kudos to @lukaslevert) this picture is a deep cut, iykyk

@radbackwards crude, but brilliant

Crazy that humanoid companies got roles like 'head of head' and give hand jobs to every mech E with SpaceX on their resume...

@brianeskow It’s a domino effect. If the person in front of me reclines, I have to recline otherwise I can barely move. Flying sucks

It is RUDE to lean your seat back on a flight. I'm dying on this hill.

Spotted in the NYC subway. “Zero screen time.” An iPod Shuffle ad in 2026. When we built the iPod, the goal was the technology disappeared and you could have your music wherever you were. 1,000 songs in your pocket. Now we’re living through a moment where people are actively looking for ways to disconnect from the infinite feed, algos, and constant notifications. That doesn’t mean technology is bad. It means the best technology understands when to step back. Not every problem needs another screen, another menu, or another layer of complexity. Constraints create freedom (read: @DavidEpstein new book Inside the Box). And often removing features creates a better product than adding them. The future of technology shouldn’t just be more engagement. It should help us be more human.

The other thing is it’s not just about search, but browsing too. Unless you’ve built deep trust in the AI based on past success, you won’t just pick from two or even three options if you know there are more you haven’t seen. Part of the joy of travel planning is browsing for the perfect spot. And you need to see the bad ones to know what the good ones are.

@danywander Around $100 billion goes through our app every year. Redesigning a flow that is AI-native but doesn’t kill conversion in the near-term is the hard part.

if you've ever questioned your presence on x, i'd send you this screenshot. but i agree with @bchesky it sounds easy to say "need a nice cabin within 2h drive" but that's super naive. in marketplaces data mismatch have a price. let me elaborate. a user says: "i need a nice cabin within 2h drive" okay. - 2 hours from where? current location? home? by car or train? - what does "nice" mean? luxury? cozy? cheap but charming? - does cabin mean an actual wooden cabin in the woods or just a house in the countryside? - when? this weekend? flexible dates? 2 adults? family? dog? budget? wifi? instant booking only? as a human we compress intent. but it doesn't work for booking systems. it needs exact constraints. chat makes the problem feel solved because the conversation feels natural. but finding a place to book is not JUST a conversation. the listings themselves are messy. - one host says "cozy" and means small. another says "cozy" and means dark basement. - photos make places look bigger. - listings are incomplete. - locations are hidden before you book. - descriptions are written like marketing copy. in natural way you could say "find me a quiet cabin with sunset views". then the question is - where is "quiet" and "sunset view" stored in database? so the ai guesses from whatever metadata it can find. sometimes it works. often it doesn't. and when wrong answer in chatgpt costs you nothing, on marketplaces mistakes cost money. - wrong cancellation rules. - pets actually not allowed. - listing unavailable. - distance wrong. - hidden fees. - bad check-in assumptions. travel is a transaction and accuracy matters way more than just add an entry on my calendar. travel is visual. people scan photos, prices, maps, ratings, amenities all at once. even if its look complex ui etc. but in chat ui it becomes just a queue: "here's option one." "here's option two." slower than a grid. way slower. and ranking gets weird. if the ai picks 5 listings why those 5? best match? paid placement? hidden bias? safety call? people still not ready to give up on personal control of the outcome. they want to be sure that they've done everything to find that exact place to stay. speed matters too. a good conversational booking needs intent parsing, availability checks, price lookup, policy fetch, ranking, maps, personalization. and many more. nobody likes waiting 10 seconds, over and over, for "thinking…" and this is just an exploration phase. then we have "book it" part. - which one? - what dates? - which card? - who's traveling? - did you accept house rules? chat feels nice until you have to sign or pay. so chat probably doesn't replace forms. it just makes discovery better. i'd bet on chat for intent to start with → filters for custom work and filtering → cards and maps for comparison → normal boring checkout. you can just make a chat as ui when the moat is still the boring stuff - trust, clean inventory and control.

The answer, in case you were wondering:

$FIG feels oversold - I don’t buy the notion that everyone is going to ideate, design, code, monitor, etc. from one single UI (Claude,ChatGPT). Rather, these intelligence control centres will unify the best data and context sources, of which Figma is the leader for design work. The same goes for pretty much every other specialized form of knowledge work. You still need product and web analytics, photo and video editing software, specialty account/CRM frontends, etc. The cognitive UX load of having everything in one single place just doesn’t work for us humans. Imagine if every single service that Google offered was in a single app. It would be a nightmare to navigate. Different people need different apps. We won’t all be wizards of every skill. One size fits all is a myth. Chat and voice are not the best UX in every situation. If you have to type in a sentence (many clicks/taps) to perform an action, you’re already too slow for human attention span. Thus, specialized apps like Figma, in my opinion, aren’t going anywhere even as the general purpose tools like Claude and ChatGPT get better and better. They’ll becoming more unified and effective together, and cannibalize some overlap, but net-net I think they both grow.

The Museum of the Human Web is @p0’s ode to the history of the Internet - a real life museum pop-up with exhibits like the first iPhone, sequoia’s investment memo for Apple, beanie babies. Open to everyone May 8-16, 9a-5p at 238 King St in SF - luma.com/h85fumdt. Come by!

What an incredible event - so over the moon with how it turned out. If you're in SF, please go check out the space, and learn more about both the history of the internet and the incredible product being built within the walls of @p0!!

iPod mirror by @Delahuntagram

Think every problem through with the mind of your mentors. That’s their greatest gift to you! When you don’t need them, they’ll be most proud.