The Coffee Bank and the Speed of Change
Like millions of others, I’ve been watching and playing with OpenAI’s new video model, Sora—and I keep thinking about how often technology outpaces permission. One week it’s coffee apps; the next, it’s cinematic worlds spun from text. Each innovation starts as convenience and ends up rewriting the rules.
Starbucks didn’t mean to become a financial institution. But every era of innovation finds its own way to test the rules.
The world runs on rules. But rules run on paperwork, committees, and calendars. Technology, on the other hand, runs on curiosity and caffeine.
That mismatch—between how fast people can build and how slowly institutions can respond—has become one of the defining forces of modern life. It’s not that people are breaking the law; it’s that the law no longer describes what people are doing.
The Coffee Bank
Starbucks is a coffee company. But in financial terms, it’s also one of the largest banks in America. Customers collectively hold nearly $2 billion in prepaid balances on Starbucks cards and apps—more than 85 percent of U.S. banks hold in total deposits.
The twist is that customers didn’t entirely choose this setup. When you pay with the Starbucks app, you can’t simply use your credit card in the moment. You have to preload money into an account. That single design choice—subtle, convenient, and completely intentional—turned every latte purchase into a micro-deposit. Starbucks quietly became a financial institution without ever applying for a banking license.
This is how change usually happens in technology: not through rebellion, but through design. What begins as a product feature becomes a regulatory blind spot, and over time, an accepted norm.
The Uber Precedent
If Starbucks represents the subtle version of this phenomenon, Uber is its loud, brash archetype.
Uber wrote the modern playbook for testing the limits of regulation. Launch first, operate in the gray, and let adoption create legitimacy. By the time regulators react, public opinion—and billions in rider demand—make reversal almost impossible.
Uber’s true innovation wasn’t just the app itself. It was the recognition that once technology hits a certain scale, the question shifts from “Is this allowed?” to “How do we live with it?” That approach—move fast, find the edges, let the system adapt—has become the default operating system of the modern tech economy. Starbucks, in its own quiet way, followed it. So have crypto networks, prediction markets, and now, artificial intelligence companies.
The Sora Moment
OpenAI’s new video model, Sora, can generate cinematic footage from a text prompt. It’s astonishing. But behind that wonder lies a familiar discomfort: whose work did it learn from?
The model didn’t invent its sense of movement, light, and storytelling in isolation. It absorbed it—from films, animation, design, and photography created by millions of people who were never asked, credited, or compensated. The company insists this is legal, and perhaps under current law it is. But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.
Copyright law wasn’t built for an era when a machine could absorb the collective visual memory of humanity. It was written for a world where “copying” meant pressing paper or burning film. The law still speaks the language of ownership. The technology now speaks the language of ingestion.
That gap—between what’s legal and what’s right—is where power quietly accumulates.
The Law Can’t Move at the Speed of Code
For most of history, invention was the bottleneck. Today, interpretation is. Regulators deliberate in years; developers iterate in days. By the time the rules catch up, the loophole has become the market.
We still talk about regulation as if it defines the edges of what’s possible. Increasingly, it just describes what people already decided to do. But acceptance and fairness are not the same thing. Just because something scales doesn’t mean it should.
As formal oversight struggles to keep pace, informal ones have stepped in: reputation, public trust, user backlash. They’re faster than legislation, but also more fragile.
The world needs builders bold enough to test limits, but principled enough to remember why those limits existed in the first place. Progress that erases the people it depends on isn’t progress—it’s extraction.
The Future Always Starts in the Gray
Every major leap forward begins in a gray area. Railroads, credit cards, the internet—all bent old rules until society decided whether to rewrite them or live with the consequences. Artificial intelligence is just the latest in that lineage.
The challenge isn’t stopping innovation; it’s ensuring that the people writing the future still feel accountable to the ones living in it. The future doesn’t always ask for permission. But maybe it should still ask for consent.