The tech sector of the economy has a structurally disproportionate amount of influence over the world. A key reason is that the number of people working in tech stays relatively low even as the number of people that their product reaches skyrockets. Take Discord: they have a few thousand employees and hundreds of millions of users. Contrast this with a business like a grocery store, where the amount of work goes up fairly steadily with the number of customers and the amount of stuff that they buy, or a lawyer’s office, where the amount of money coming in is tied to the amount of billable hours worked by specific attorneys and their staff.

The reason that so many businesses want to invest in AI is the potential of pushing this dynamic even further. A traditional law firm can only take on so many cases before needing to hire more attorneys; in contrast, the theoretical AI equivalent could serve tons of people with a few prompt engineers and the AI agents that they delegate the lawyerin’ to.

The animated GIF is a new kind of ideogram that computers have added to our lives. (An ideogram is a visual symbol that indicates an idea without corresponding to any specific spoken sounds.) You can convey a vibrant feeling in a brief moment of video, as long as the feeling is along the lines of: Leonardo DiCaprio raising a wine glass. Donald Glover carrying pizzas reaching a room filled with flames. A white guy blinking in idle consternation.

So why is the GIF under attack? Everywhere, platforms and hosting services are trying to replace it with other file formats. “GIFs” on Twitter are MP4 videos, set to be soundless and looping. Imgur introduced the concept of “GifVs,” which are mp4 or WebM videos that are displayed like GIFs, way back in 2014. The framework I’m using to create this blog, Astro, will automatically turn GIFs into WebP files when I deploy the site to production. One of the ground zeroes for the animated GIF phenomenon, Tumblr, has been experimenting with videos-as-GIFs for years, writing extensive, carefully-worded posts to try to introduce the concept without angering their userbase.

And make no mistake - users hate new file formats, like WebP. Statistically, you probably hate .webp files already. Here’s what a brief Google search has to say about them:

So why does this format exist? Why do any file formats exist? Why do I care? Let’s consider the practicalities.