The Carrot
Cake Theory

I watched a video the other night. Sam Smith has a food account now. Calls everyone piggies. It's ridiculous and I love it.

In this one, they go to a tiny cake shop in Japan. The baker moved there from Brooklyn. He makes carrot cake. Not a thousand carrot cakes. Just what he can make that day. Then he sells them, and he's done.

And people line up for it. Not because it's the most efficient cake. Because it's his cake. You can't get it in another city. You can't get it from a chain. You can barely get it from him, because he runs out.

I haven't stopped thinking about it.

Everything is about to get easy

Here's what I believe. AI is going to make making things easy. Ten times easier. A hundred. A thousand. More content, more products, more everything, faster and cheaper than we can imagine right now.

And when everything is easy to make, easy stops meaning anything. Perfect stops meaning anything. The flood of flawless stuff becomes wallpaper.

What gets rare is the opposite. The thing one human made, in one place, in limited supply. The thing with fingerprints on it.

The variance is the value

That baker's cake is a little different every time. Maybe the carrots were sweeter this week. Maybe he was tired and heavy-handed with the cinnamon. Maybe he put in one teaspoon instead of two — not on purpose. Because he's human.

A machine calls that an error. A person calls it Tuesday. The variance isn't the bug. It's the proof someone was there.

Why this is a cycling post, I promise

This is the whole idea behind Cycle for Change.

I could raise money a hundred more efficient ways. Automate the asks. Optimize the funnel. I know how — I did that kind of work for a long time.

But you can't automate a mile. Somebody has to ride it.

10,000 miles, and every single one goes through my legs. Some in the wind. Some in the heat. Some slow, because I'm human and some days are like that. No two rides the same. That's the point. That's what your pledge is attached to — not a number on a dashboard, but a person out on the road, doing a thing that can't be faked or scaled or copied.

And the money lands with queer-community organizations doing the same kind of work. Small rooms. Real people. Care that's a little different every day because humans are giving it. You can't mass-produce a safe place for a queer kid. Somebody has to hold the door.

Protect the handmade

I'm not against the machines. I use them every day. They built parts of this website.

But the future I want has both. The abundant stuff, and the scarce stuff. The infinite feed, and the guy in Japan who makes eight cakes and goes home.

So find your version of the cake shop. The small thing made by one person. Buy it. Line up for it. Tell people about it. Because in a world where everything can be generated, the handmade thing is the honest thing.

Me, I'll be on the bike.