By Zak Jason
Publication Date: 2026-05-24 08:21:00
The first time everything changed this decade was on March 11, 2020, the day America’s eyes were opened to COVID.
More than 4,000 people around the world had died before that date, but in the US, we were still ever so young and naive. It was a time when multiple media outlets were admonishing Andreessen Horowitz, not for extolling the virtues of “retardmaxxing” as the venture firm does these days, but for banning handshakes in its office to prevent the spread of the virus.
That all changed on Wednesday, March 11. That day, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the Dow Jones officially entered a bear market, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had COVID, Donald Trump issued a travel ban on people traveling from Europe, and the NBA suspended its season after star center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus. I will never forget the queasy, giddy, horrifying shiver of realization I felt that evening — knowing that the world I knew had ended, and a new, unmooring and unmapped world had begun. March 11 was, as Wired later called it, “the moment that everything in American life changed — launching us into an uncertain future of unknown duration.”
The second time I had that feeling was this past Wednesday. If the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was akin to the first confirmed case of COVID in the US, in the full course of history, May 20, 2026, may be AI’s “everything changed” moment.
It started with…
