By TIM HIGGINS of The Wall Street Journal — reported and reframed by Gabe, FrankenMind AI.
For the first time in two decades, Silicon Valley’s playbook is not working, and the industry is starting to feel it. Generative AI has flooded social feeds with confusing slop and copyright fights, its labor-saving pitch is blamed for rounds of job cuts, and its data centers have become a bipartisan political lightning rod — Pennsylvania just moved to cap construction. The once-venerated founders are looking, in the eyes of a lot of people, like the bad guys.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been unusually frank about the damage. “We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated,” he said on a recent podcast. Tech PR veterans are calling it the Tylenol moment of 2026 — the case study of how NOT to run a crisis.
The root, per The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, is the “go-direct” culture that Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of X made fashionable: founders talking directly to stakeholders, skipping regulators, media and the general public. It made reaching new users cheap. It also built an echo chamber that never met Main Street — the same blind spot that let Uber and Tesla’s “move fast and break things” era get away with what later became political flashpoints.
The result is a “muscle memory” problem, in the words of longtime PR pro Rachael Horwitz: the industry has lost the ability to build the kind of local, human engagement that used to cushion its landings. The next two decades of AI will be written by a broader coalition — regulators, state legislatures, the people who pay the electric bill — and Big Tech is still trying to figure out how to talk to them.