Full quote (+ bonus paragraph), since you somehow wanted to refer to something but exactly what is unclear, as you didn't actually write anything...
> That leaves the question of crypto; given its oppositional nature to the current paradigm — decentralization, encryption, and ownership — it is clearly something completely new; moreover, the capital chasing returns in crypto is clearly financial capital, not production capital.
> That suggests that crypto will continue to exist in a bit of a parallel universe, which makes sense; it already has its own currencies, after all. That is another way of saying I think that crypto is still very early in its lifecycle; 2017 wasn’t the big crash, nor will the next one be — remember that tech had its own internal boom-and-bust cycles in the three decades between the introduction of the Intel processor and the Dotcom bubble. Nor is this a bearish take: those three decades were exceptionally profitable for everyone involved — including Sequoia, which was founded in 1972. Perhaps its successor, the one that shifts to providing productive capital for crypto companies decades from now, has already been born.
Is anyone else really disappointed where this era ended up? Mobile + cloud seems like darkest possible timeline you could tell me would exist when I was on my Commodore 64 dialing a BBS. I guess I didn’t understand the implications of everyone being connected and on at all times. It didn’t turn out as I planned. It all pretty much destroyed my family and friends.
our digital lives are now lived within black box straight-jacketing walled gardens, mediated by undemocratically wielded algorithms and protocols.
there is no hardware interoperability, modularity and repairability. it's just obfuscated single-use hardware with parasitic economic rents through and through.
"What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity." [1]
> Can you elaborate on how mobile and cloud destroyed your family and friends?
'cloud' SaaSS social media firms are soul-sucking culture-destroying black-boxes optimized for 'engagement' - i.e. highlighting the worst of humanity (while ignoring the magic). it exploits people's insecurities, their shame, their grief, their desire to belong. it's one of the most destructive homogenizing forces that exist today.
what i want to see is the abolishing of the intellectual property system and the abolishing of silicon valley [2]. what if we had a world wide web that was inherently dedicated to lifelong learning and growth for all? universal access to our techno-scientific inheritance? all i see today are walls instead of bridges. instead we need open protocols and open standards from the top to the bottom of the stack.
That’s interesting, but “Can you elaborate on how mobile and cloud destroyed your family and friends?” If you think you can’t without violating their privacy, then that’s fine, of course.
Everything isn't paid for by ads. There are many other revenue models for businesses outside of ads.
And ads are not the driver of the desire for businesses to become more operationally efficient (via measuring more things). That drive exists independent of ads.
The vast majority of services used on the internet by everyday people are paid for by ads. If you measure where people spend their time online, it is on average almost entirely within products supported by ads.
Likely to be the case within the scope of “consumer sites/apps used most frequently by users”. But I don’t think that encapsulates all the technology of ‘this era’, as the OP referenced. I don’t think it even encapsulates all of the supporting infrastructure that the consumer sites/apps lean on to provide their services.
The context was how technology is invading people's lives via always being connected. This is clearly pointing at consumer tech, which is almost universally ad supported.
Additionally, if these ad supported services use paid-for services, they are paying for them with ad revenue, making them effectively ad supported themselves.
I'm assuming we don't have any factual disagreements here, it seems like there is just context ambiguity and we're talking past each other.
For instance, when you say 'consumer tech', I don't only think of social media, internet search, and media/content sites. It is true that people spend a lot of time on those sites, and many of them rely on advertising revenue to support themselves (sometimes exclusively, sometimes partially).
When I think of consumer tech, I think of it more broadly[1], and the larger stack. One example part of that stack is hardware and physical devices, which are required for anyone to even access such sites. We wouldn't 'always be connected' if not for advances in mobile/hardware.
To touch on the slippery concept of 'if ad-supported services use paid-for services, they are effectively ad-supported then': this is a weird take and word game to play. Why stop there? Where does the ad revenue come from? Advertisers. Where do the advertisers money come from to pay for ads? Mostly not ads themselves, but from a host of different revenue models. So using this logic, ad-supported services are effectively a bunch of different revenue models? (so could one then hand-wave away the ad revenue model altogether?)
It’s a problem of technical complexity (and UX) that creates incentives around centralization.
I’m hopeful urbit can be a way out of it: https://urbit.org/ I think without really thinking of the underlying issues with the stack and tackling that directly, other existing attempts at federated systems are DOA and won’t solve the real problem.
It is not mobile + cloud that ended up here. It is lack of symmetric fiber to the home connections. People do not have upload capacity at home, so there is no choice but to depend on large cloud providers. If people had upload capacity, then it could have been possible to host your own backup solutions or media or personal websites.
I have symmetric gigabit fiber at home, a lot of experience managing tech and servers, and absolutely zero desire to host important things at my house.
For less than $10/month I can get a cloud server plenty powerful for anything I want to host with power and bandwidth that are orders of magnitude more reliable than what I can get at my home. Plus I don't have to worry about floods, fires, or theft causing me to lose all of my data and backups stored at home.
If fiber to the home was widespread, then the market for people who might buy a self hosted solutions would be big enough to be addressable?
Also, it is not an either or scenario. You can still backup to a different location in someone else’s computers. Fiber to the home just gives people the option to not solely depend on others’ computers.
>If people had upload capacity, then it could have been possible to host your own backup solutions or media or personal websites.
But a lot of us techies here have 1 Gbit dl+ul symmetric bandwidth and yet most of us would rather put source code on Github instead of self-hosting Gitlab at home. Why? Because most of us would rather do something else in our lives that's more high-priority than babysitting a git server (or self-hosted email server, or self-hosted NNTP USENET server instead of discussing stuff here on HN, etc).
If (most) techies don't want to self-host, why would it be realistic to expect the mass population to self-host media or personal websites?
There's another underlying reason other than upload bandwidth limitation.
I self-host my own git server, and I imagine many others do too. But I also publish all my repositories on GitHub (my git server syncs one way to GH) too, you know why? Because discovery is entirely fucking broken for self-hosted stuff. Nobody would ever fucking see your self-hosted content.
Search engines are broken for code discovery because of sheer inaccuracy and SEO spam.
Perhaps at this very moment in time there is another reason, but lack of upload bandwidth is a structural reason, a necessary but not sufficient parameter. Without that, we cannot move forward.
It is possible for me to envision a past or future where 90%+ percent of people have fiber to the home and we would have developed hardware and software to be able to route around the major cloud providers, including peer to peer software and hardware that works like appliances.
We started with computers that only people invested a lot of time into understanding could use, and now we have iPads and iPhones that people generally cannot break and are much simpler and can be swapped out. I do not see why that type of future would not be possible if everyone had significant upload capacity at home (and having ipv6 and not being stuck behind CGNAT).
I'm very skeptical of this take. I don't think that bandwidth is the limiting factor for self-hosting. The limiting factor is that it's not easy/convenient enough to setup such a system, and most users don't care enough where their files sit (or comprehend the potential externalities).
If you thought upload capacity was the limiting factor for self-hosting, why wouldn't those same upload capacity constraints negatively impact cloud adoption? You still have to upload your files to a cloud server.
>If you thought upload capacity was the limiting factor for self-hosting, why wouldn't those same upload capacity constraints negatively impact cloud adoption? You still have to upload your files to a cloud server.
Those uploads are happening at varying speeds at varying times of day, as the capacity allows it. And the constraints do negatively impact cloud adoption, as families that were stuck at home found out trying to have multiple video calls and quality is degraded.
There can be more than one limiting factor, but obviously bandwidth is a fundamental limiting factor. Without it, you are not even going to see companies explore the options of selling self hosted solutions, hence we do not even know what advancements in easy/convenient self hosted systems might have been. What peer to peer capabilities we may have had.
Societies with home connections heavily allocated for download and minimal upload are just asking to be controlled by gatekeepers.
Sure, one can look at the development arches, from tinkerers to creators to the masses.
But there's another view, these parallel lines of development. For example, computers have had games on them since the start.
So what else is occurring on social media platforms used by people on their phones, beside manufactured outrage? Or are there games that teach kids some valuable skills instead of addicting them to some loop?
For one, one can still organize events with the help of Facebook. Real physical gettogethers. I learned a lot of English, typing and how to use the mouse from games - and I use these skills every day at my work, to a great advantage. Some games made you think, at least a little bit. People are still discussing and learning on Hacker News. I think in general the etiquette is better than ever.
There's entirely new forms of humor - memes. That's awesome. There's a theory that humor exists for learning purposes. The best jokes have a surprising punchline.
We can look at older media platforms like television. Sure, there are talk shows and reality TV filling the ever growing number of channels. You see filler with some tubers just sitting there talking. Is youtube considered TV? The front page of youtube on anonymous mode is complete garbage, probably worse than any TV channel ever existing anywhere. There's the formulaic Netflix show that feels like it's made to tick some boxes. But on the other hand, there's more variety, as there is a smaller threshold for publication. I've seen great TV material made in Spain, Korea, France, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Denmark and China. I think TV is more artsy and multifaceted than before, maybe not on average, but there's more of that material available.
So I would say things are still evolving. Some fields, where no new technical inventions have happened, like fashion, are still changing, but they have become cyclical.
TL;DR venture capital is becoming regular capital because tech companies keep growing fast well after the IPO; “the next big thing” is not coming on the short term, just more techy companies surfing VC money and more growth for tech companies; the current cycle is not yet ripe for disruption.
The traditional model of plant for 5 years and harvest for 5 years is dying/dead. Seed investments are getting larger and bleeding into Series A. Companies are staying private for longer. Liquidation events can be pushed further out without compromising growth. Sequoia Productive Capital makes the 10 year cycle less important. This allows Sequoia to focus on sourcing deals and reallocating capital accordingly to deliver results, which they have been consistent enough to keep acquiring capital from LPs. We are also seeing outsized returns on existing investments so sticking around for Series D/E/etc. and multiple years post-IPO might be key to get the 50-100+x returns.
> ...and he can surely make something simple sound extremely complex.
Sadly, I think a lot of people producing content these days see this as a feature, not a bug. The more complex and/or sophisticated you make something sound, the more insightful it must be, and the more intelligent (and therefore valuable) you must be as a source of knowledge.
Although slightly off-topic, your points are totally valid.
I remember reading something somewhere that said that even people whose job it is to digest large amounts of info daily would benefit from ideas expressed in a clear and direct way versus straight forward ideas that are made to appear complex.
In other words, even highly sophisticated readers will be able to read your pieces faster and by extension, consume more of your material when you go the extra length to express your ideas in clear and familiar language.
I agree and that's the reason I unsubscribed also. I just don't have the time!
Although I suspect the reason is that he's got an extremely fast turnaround, and doesn't have the additional time to distill all those thoughts into shorter articles. He should hire some (more?) editors.
it's very possible for you to have the experience you're describing from a system, and for the system to be predatory and extractive.
Just as many people live in nice suburbs and work in cities where there's extreme poverty. They get a good life, don't often have to contend with the pain and suffering of others, and can dismiss those claims as exaggeration.
> whenever I open the app it's just fun photos and updates from the people I want to keep in touch with. I have zero problems with that because I enjoy seeing the people around me happy, having fun, and succeeding.
Zuck, is that you? (i'm joking. surely Zuck has better things to do than hang out on online forums...)
it's interesting how you engage with only a small portion of my comment. it seems you didn't bother clicking through to the deeper critiques of the tech industry that i referenced (Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley Tribune article/essay). you casually dismiss serious in-depth critiques of today's system with anecdotal information ("I can access whatever I want, discuss whatever I want"); also by suggesting that i yearn to feel a sense of elitism or be a part of some sort of 'in-group'; that i don't have a facebook account, and that i live inside of an echo-chamber, all without actually engaging with the material and any of the arguments.
would you consider that maybe it is you who is living inside the Silicon Valley echo-chamber? your blanket statements and straw man arguments are suspiciously echo-chamber -like [1]
anyway, hope you're having fun up there on Elysium
Can we just skip to the last season in which Zuck begins the final stage of his plan to unify all metaverse-enabled human conscioussness into the singularity?
46 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] thread> That leaves the question of crypto; given its oppositional nature to the current paradigm — decentralization, encryption, and ownership — it is clearly something completely new; moreover, the capital chasing returns in crypto is clearly financial capital, not production capital.
> That suggests that crypto will continue to exist in a bit of a parallel universe, which makes sense; it already has its own currencies, after all. That is another way of saying I think that crypto is still very early in its lifecycle; 2017 wasn’t the big crash, nor will the next one be — remember that tech had its own internal boom-and-bust cycles in the three decades between the introduction of the Intel processor and the Dotcom bubble. Nor is this a bearish take: those three decades were exceptionally profitable for everyone involved — including Sequoia, which was founded in 1972. Perhaps its successor, the one that shifts to providing productive capital for crypto companies decades from now, has already been born.
there is no hardware interoperability, modularity and repairability. it's just obfuscated single-use hardware with parasitic economic rents through and through.
"What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity." [1]
> Can you elaborate on how mobile and cloud destroyed your family and friends?
'cloud' SaaSS social media firms are soul-sucking culture-destroying black-boxes optimized for 'engagement' - i.e. highlighting the worst of humanity (while ignoring the magic). it exploits people's insecurities, their shame, their grief, their desire to belong. it's one of the most destructive homogenizing forces that exist today.
what i want to see is the abolishing of the intellectual property system and the abolishing of silicon valley [2]. what if we had a world wide web that was inherently dedicated to lifelong learning and growth for all? universal access to our techno-scientific inheritance? all i see today are walls instead of bridges. instead we need open protocols and open standards from the top to the bottom of the stack.
[1] https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86
[2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
And ads are not the driver of the desire for businesses to become more operationally efficient (via measuring more things). That drive exists independent of ads.
Additionally, if these ad supported services use paid-for services, they are paying for them with ad revenue, making them effectively ad supported themselves.
For instance, when you say 'consumer tech', I don't only think of social media, internet search, and media/content sites. It is true that people spend a lot of time on those sites, and many of them rely on advertising revenue to support themselves (sometimes exclusively, sometimes partially).
When I think of consumer tech, I think of it more broadly[1], and the larger stack. One example part of that stack is hardware and physical devices, which are required for anyone to even access such sites. We wouldn't 'always be connected' if not for advances in mobile/hardware.
To touch on the slippery concept of 'if ad-supported services use paid-for services, they are effectively ad-supported then': this is a weird take and word game to play. Why stop there? Where does the ad revenue come from? Advertisers. Where do the advertisers money come from to pay for ads? Mostly not ads themselves, but from a host of different revenue models. So using this logic, ad-supported services are effectively a bunch of different revenue models? (so could one then hand-wave away the ad revenue model altogether?)
[1]" https://builtin.com/consumer-tech
I’m hopeful urbit can be a way out of it: https://urbit.org/ I think without really thinking of the underlying issues with the stack and tackling that directly, other existing attempts at federated systems are DOA and won’t solve the real problem.
For less than $10/month I can get a cloud server plenty powerful for anything I want to host with power and bandwidth that are orders of magnitude more reliable than what I can get at my home. Plus I don't have to worry about floods, fires, or theft causing me to lose all of my data and backups stored at home.
Also, it is not an either or scenario. You can still backup to a different location in someone else’s computers. Fiber to the home just gives people the option to not solely depend on others’ computers.
But a lot of us techies here have 1 Gbit dl+ul symmetric bandwidth and yet most of us would rather put source code on Github instead of self-hosting Gitlab at home. Why? Because most of us would rather do something else in our lives that's more high-priority than babysitting a git server (or self-hosted email server, or self-hosted NNTP USENET server instead of discussing stuff here on HN, etc).
If (most) techies don't want to self-host, why would it be realistic to expect the mass population to self-host media or personal websites?
There's another underlying reason other than upload bandwidth limitation.
Search engines are broken for code discovery because of sheer inaccuracy and SEO spam.
And that aside my git server is IPv6-only.
It is possible for me to envision a past or future where 90%+ percent of people have fiber to the home and we would have developed hardware and software to be able to route around the major cloud providers, including peer to peer software and hardware that works like appliances.
We started with computers that only people invested a lot of time into understanding could use, and now we have iPads and iPhones that people generally cannot break and are much simpler and can be swapped out. I do not see why that type of future would not be possible if everyone had significant upload capacity at home (and having ipv6 and not being stuck behind CGNAT).
If you thought upload capacity was the limiting factor for self-hosting, why wouldn't those same upload capacity constraints negatively impact cloud adoption? You still have to upload your files to a cloud server.
Those uploads are happening at varying speeds at varying times of day, as the capacity allows it. And the constraints do negatively impact cloud adoption, as families that were stuck at home found out trying to have multiple video calls and quality is degraded.
There can be more than one limiting factor, but obviously bandwidth is a fundamental limiting factor. Without it, you are not even going to see companies explore the options of selling self hosted solutions, hence we do not even know what advancements in easy/convenient self hosted systems might have been. What peer to peer capabilities we may have had.
Societies with home connections heavily allocated for download and minimal upload are just asking to be controlled by gatekeepers.
But there's another view, these parallel lines of development. For example, computers have had games on them since the start.
So what else is occurring on social media platforms used by people on their phones, beside manufactured outrage? Or are there games that teach kids some valuable skills instead of addicting them to some loop?
For one, one can still organize events with the help of Facebook. Real physical gettogethers. I learned a lot of English, typing and how to use the mouse from games - and I use these skills every day at my work, to a great advantage. Some games made you think, at least a little bit. People are still discussing and learning on Hacker News. I think in general the etiquette is better than ever.
There's entirely new forms of humor - memes. That's awesome. There's a theory that humor exists for learning purposes. The best jokes have a surprising punchline.
We can look at older media platforms like television. Sure, there are talk shows and reality TV filling the ever growing number of channels. You see filler with some tubers just sitting there talking. Is youtube considered TV? The front page of youtube on anonymous mode is complete garbage, probably worse than any TV channel ever existing anywhere. There's the formulaic Netflix show that feels like it's made to tick some boxes. But on the other hand, there's more variety, as there is a smaller threshold for publication. I've seen great TV material made in Spain, Korea, France, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Denmark and China. I think TV is more artsy and multifaceted than before, maybe not on average, but there's more of that material available.
So I would say things are still evolving. Some fields, where no new technical inventions have happened, like fashion, are still changing, but they have become cyclical.
FAAMG can staff up a team to clone your product if they think you're onto something.
Two things lack in FANNG:
1) Focus. 2) Politics.
But holy cow, can he use 8x more words to convey his thoughts than needed - and he can surely make something simple sound extremely complex.
He raises good points but I really wish he would do some major editing and simplication in his posts.
Sadly, I think a lot of people producing content these days see this as a feature, not a bug. The more complex and/or sophisticated you make something sound, the more insightful it must be, and the more intelligent (and therefore valuable) you must be as a source of knowledge.
I remember reading something somewhere that said that even people whose job it is to digest large amounts of info daily would benefit from ideas expressed in a clear and direct way versus straight forward ideas that are made to appear complex.
In other words, even highly sophisticated readers will be able to read your pieces faster and by extension, consume more of your material when you go the extra length to express your ideas in clear and familiar language.
What do you now read in its place?
Although I suspect the reason is that he's got an extremely fast turnaround, and doesn't have the additional time to distill all those thoughts into shorter articles. He should hire some (more?) editors.
Just as many people live in nice suburbs and work in cities where there's extreme poverty. They get a good life, don't often have to contend with the pain and suffering of others, and can dismiss those claims as exaggeration.
Zuck, is that you? (i'm joking. surely Zuck has better things to do than hang out on online forums...)
it's interesting how you engage with only a small portion of my comment. it seems you didn't bother clicking through to the deeper critiques of the tech industry that i referenced (Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley Tribune article/essay). you casually dismiss serious in-depth critiques of today's system with anecdotal information ("I can access whatever I want, discuss whatever I want"); also by suggesting that i yearn to feel a sense of elitism or be a part of some sort of 'in-group'; that i don't have a facebook account, and that i live inside of an echo-chamber, all without actually engaging with the material and any of the arguments.
would you consider that maybe it is you who is living inside the Silicon Valley echo-chamber? your blanket statements and straw man arguments are suspiciously echo-chamber -like [1]
anyway, hope you're having fun up there on Elysium
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...