The Familiar Ogre Glossary
The Familiar Ogre is commercial interest arriving, again, inside a project that began with higher stated purposes.
The ogre does not always arrive as obvious corruption. Often it arrives as a roadmap discussion, a revenue target, an enterprise contract, an advertising experiment, a cloud commitment, a retention metric, or the sensible observation that someone has to pay for all this compute.
The phrase is useful because it avoids two lazy positions. It does not say commerce is evil. Commerce built much of the world we use. It also does not pretend that commercial structure is morally neutral once a system becomes the interface through which people think, search, write, and decide.
The ogre is familiar because we have seen it before: search, social media, streaming, newspapers, television, and now AI.