Elemental differences
Look up graphite, graphite company, or graphite the company, and you’ll mostly get geological and industrial answers. (Unless, of course, your search history suggests the company signing the billboard above.)
The easy way to find out, of course, is to ask your friendly AI. It will tell you the company behind the billboard above is Graphite.com, formerly (and still) Graphite.dev. They are an AI code review platform. Your AI will also tell you that kind of billboard is called a “wallscape.” Didn’t know that until I asked.
The billboard copy is a play on Marshall McLuhan‘s most-quoted one-liner, The medium is the message. What McLuhan meant was that the character of the medium matters more than the content it carries. He also doesn’t confine the meaning of “media” to the communicative kind. He means all forms of tech. For example, he said that trains made farms as much as they made cities. Eric McLuhan, Marshall’s son and collaborator, writes, “People don’t want to know the cause of anything. They do not want to know why radio caused Hitler and Gandhi alike. They do not want to know that print caused anything whatever.”
So: What does AI cause? The glib answer found in many news stories is “job loss.” Graphite is saying it gives you a new job.
The McLuhans might say that’s small beer. Because every new technology doesn’t just cause widely different outcomes (such as radio did for Hitler and Gandhi). It creates new environments, new ecosystems. Old jobs will be lost and new jobs found, but in service of many radically changed and new forms of work, play, and everything else.
I think the main question is whether AI, or the environment created by AI, will enlarge or shrink human agency. Of course, it will do both. But I’m betting on more of the latter. So is Graphite, I suppose.
Thinkings out loud
Overheard: “In tech, every bit of progress makes something easy obsolete.”
Did AI make me believe this?
Charley Johnson: AI Can Change Your Mind Without You Noticing
Why just brands?
WordPress VIP: Future of the Web 2026: Chapter 1: The brand that feels human in the AI era earns the decade ahead.
A way for your stuff
Phil Windley: Using Home Assistant with Manifold.
Further evidence that advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely
Joe Mandese in MediaPost: Why Malvertising’s New Vector May Leave A Sour Taste In Your Mouth. Excerpt: “Advertising — or more explicitly, ‘malvertising’ — has long been a vector for distributing malicious software, but a new, insidious exploit utilizes an innovative model for distributing it. Instead of utilizing a single malvertisement to install malicious code on a user’s device — usually by redirecting the user to a landing page that automatically download pre-compiled malicious code — SourTrade does it in clandestine installments, treating the user’s browser as a passive file receiver that functions as an active local compiler or assembler launching the code when it is completed. You can read more about it in this post by the team at cybersecurity firm Confiant…” Which is here.
I also learned the term “wallscape” from the same AI that told me who Graphite was.
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