Hi, I'm Keith Jones and this is Retrograde.

I’ve wanted to do some version of this for a very long time.

Long before OpenAI. Before Gartner. Before my first tech startup over 10 years ago. Before I knew what “market analysis” or “systems thinking” even meant.

I’ve always written.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, this includes the very cringe-worthy LiveJournal era of the mid-2000s where teenage Keith would essentially dump raw emotional thoughts onto the internet with absolutely zero concern for consequences, professionalism, or future employability. At one point I distinctly remember a youth pastor from the church I attended then pulling me aside to lecture me about my use of profanity online.

I appreciate that he was paying attention to what I was doing on the internet and I understand where he was coming from given the expectations I was supposed to perform against at the time.

Unfortunately for those expectations though, it was authentically me.

And I think authenticity matters more than polish when you’re trying to say something real.

Many years later, during my time at Gartner, a friend helping ramp me into my analyst role once described the job as being “somewhere between an investigative journalist and an industry analyst.” That framing stuck with me. Because beneath all the market maps, vendor briefings, and enterprise jargon, the real job was pattern recognition. Synthesis. Trying to understand not just what technology was doing, but what people were doing with it — and what they were doing to each other through it.

That fascination has only deepened after nearly three years at OpenAI, where working for a frontier lab and living inside the AI industry during this particular moment in history has often felt equal parts exhilarating, surreal, historically significant, and deeply strange.

Which is probably why Retrograde exists.

The name comes from the idea that technological progress is rarely as linear as we pretend it is. New systems often recreate old human behaviors. Every supposedly revolutionary era eventually rediscovers ancient incentives, familiar power structures, recurring social anxieties, and deeply human emotional patterns underneath the surface.

The interfaces change. Human nature usually doesn’t.

This site is ultimately an attempt to think through all of that in public. AI, enterprise systems, gadgets, consumer technology, internet culture, productivity, organizational behavior, digital life, and whatever other signal feels worth paying attention to at a given moment.

I have no idea if anyone will actually read this.

Selfishly, I hope some people do. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Maybe my association with OpenAI helps. Maybe it doesn’t. Readership is probably the only real litmus test for whether a voice resonates.

But even if nobody reads it, I’ll probably keep writing here anyway.

Because at some point I realized the act of paying closer attention and trying to articulate what feels true underneath all the noise is valuable on its own.

Especially for someone like myself whose neurodivergent brain is already compulsively trying to connect all these dots at all hours of the day anyway. Thank you, ADHD pattern recognition ;)

So that’s Retrograde.

Equal parts me finally deciding to just fucking do it and start writing publicly whether I earn readership or not, and equal parts an attempt to apply the same analytical and systems-oriented lens I’ve spent years developing across Gartner, OpenAI, and the broader technology industry to the strange moment we all currently seem to be living through.

I’ll be publishing weekly, monthly, and quarterly posts here. Some will be more immediate and reactive. Others will zoom out and attempt to connect larger patterns underneath the noise.

At the moment, I genuinely have no idea what this eventually becomes.

I have enormous respect for the fourth estate and for the people who have spent years or decades honing both their voice and their craft. Some of my own role models in this space are people like Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Marques Brownlee — all people I’ve awkwardly attempted to email while thinking about making this leap.

Spoiler alert: no responses.

Which is fair, honestly.

But even if Retrograde only ever becomes a slightly more thoughtful and mature evolution of those deeply unfiltered LiveJournal posts from my teenage years, I still think that’s pretty fucking cool.

Because at the end of the day, this project is really just an attempt to pay closer attention. To think more carefully. To articulate what feels true underneath all the noise of modern digital life while we’re all living through it in real time.

And if you happen to enjoy reading any of it as this thing gets underway — genuinely — thank you.

If you’re a real human being spending your limited time on Earth reading my words on the internet, I appreciate you more than you probably realize.

Here’s to Retrograde and whatever it may or may not become in the years ahead.

Cheers,

Keith Jones