A portentous reunion

Summary

I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids. Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war. Still, 2026 does feel singular: every conversation that I had with my fellow '96ers seemingly circled back to the effects that LLMs are having on knowledge work — and the anxiety felt for the future. Beyond LLMs, there was another topic that came up quite a few times (albeit among an admittedly small and self-selecting demographic). This was a very specific kind of nostalgia for the three-decades-old past, and explaining it necessitates a bit of backstory…​ In my first year of college in 1992, my friends and I loved to play the terrific Wesleyan Tetris by Randall Cook, the so-called "asshole tetris" that would make your game difficult (by inserting squares or taking them away or similar mischief) — and then make fun of you for it. I thought it would be neat to make a two-player Tetris with similar inspiration — but instead of the computer making your life difficult, it would be your networked opponent. In the summer of 1993, I resolved to write a version of what I had in mind: two players duel in Tetris, accumulating money (by getting dice in cleared lines), and then using that money to buy weapons to screw up the opponent’s game (flipping their board upside down, making the pieces spin out of control, giving them oddly shaped pieces, e...