Raphael's workbench

The Death of the Public Internet and Rise of Private Group Chats

This month’s book reads:

Rich Dad Poor Dad — Robert T. Kiyosaki
I read this because other books and things I was reading often referred to it. In hindsight, I understand why it is popular. The main thing it has going for itself is how it pushes the reader to reflect on how their upbringing shaped their relationship to money. Based on my modest experience so far, I would say the remaining how-to advice is thin as best, poor otherwise. The advice to challenge one’s mindset about money, however, is good. I had already been primed on this topic when I read The Psychology of Money last February. A much better book in my opinion. If you want to approach this topic, don’t read Rich Dad Poor Dad and read that other book instead. Or, if you do not have time, read How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think by Patrick McKenzie.
The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World — Alan Downs
This came up in my reading list after I had started to shape up my thoughts on the topics covered earlier. I had heard of this book before and wanted to check if it would help. On the one hand, no, reading this book did not help with my concerns. On the other hand, it is actually a pretty decent book. It contains useful insights, and it rephrases certain cultural pains into more positive narratives. I would even recommend it to non-gay people to generate more empathy and acceptance.

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Quite a bit of interstitial learning as well.

On economics, I liked Nathan Goldwag’s reverse engineering of the Moral Economy of the Shire, where he reveals that Tolkien was writing about a highly stratified society with staggering wealth inequality. Choice quote:

We see a petty aristocrat like Frodo Baggins, and don’t see all the labor that goes into sustaining his lifestyle. We see a successful peasant family like the Gamgees, and don’t see all the trade-offs and compromises necessary to scrape out a living. We see the hierarchies of traditional rural society, and because it’s alien and exotic, we see it as natural and idyllic, instead of merely a different system for organizing labor and wealth.

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In Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage, Ranjan Roy muses how it is at all possible that DoorDash sells a pizza to the end customer for less than it pays the pizzeria to bake it. (Actual arbitrage and economic fun ensues.) The choice quote is found in the discussion below the article; Collin Wallace from EatGeek teaches us:

They are in the business of finance. In many ways, they are like payday lenders for restaurants and drivers. They give you the sensation of cash-flow, but at the expense of your long term future and financial stability. Once you “take out this loan” you will never pay it back and it will ultimately kill your business.

In the case of restaurants, these platforms slowly siphon off your customers and then charge you to have access to them. They are simultaneously selling these same customers to your competitor across the street, but, don’t worry, they are also selling their customers to you.

For drivers, they are banking on a workforce that is willing to mortgage their assets, like cars and time, well below market value, in exchange for money now. They know that most delivery drivers are simply not doing the math on the actual cost of providing delivery (time, gas, car maintenance, payroll taxes…etc). If they did, drivers would realize that they are actually the ones subsidizing the cost of delivery.

All this nurtures some intuition on my side that DoorDash (and Uber Eats, GrubHub etc, and to a large extent the gig economy at large) is a symptom of a sick economy, where money from the future is being spent today at a net negative value for society. “Markets remain irrational for longer than investors remain solvent” and all that, yet I still wonder how many underlying SaaS and their dependencies will follow when that ship finally sinks.

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On a more serious note, Bruce Schneier (yes, that one) came out to talk about how large tech companies are borrowing from our collective social future to finance their present profits. He makes two interesting points.

One is that these large corporations have built mechanisms to manipulate culture at scale, and are actually using these mechanisms to manipulate consumers into behaviors that are economically advantageous today, at the expense of social dysfunctions later.

The other point is that traditionally, the power to exert influence like that was the monopoly of the state, often democratically elected. This is not so anymore, and it might well cause social unrest. “Amidst a tug-of-war between the old state-centric world and the emerging capital-centric world, there is a growing radicalism fueled partly by frustration over social and personal needs going unmet under a transnational order that is maximized for profit rather than public good.” (An extra emphasis would be that the problem is exacerbated by the fact these corporations are fundamentally feudal, and history tells us that regular people get tired of the feudalism above them, eventually.)

(Most of the paragraphs in that article tell something important. My summary of these two points does not do them justice. The full thing is worth a read.)

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One possible antidote to this economic-political development is to gate keep access to social groups from corporations. What if “the world wide web” moved away from the public sphere (and thus away from global economic forces driven by a few large companies) and became a pool of resources only shared across vetted social links?

In Group chats rule the world, Sriram Krishnan posits that “most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats.” My pet theory is that most of the conversations in the world, period, happen in private group chats. The next step from there is building a network of shared (and shareable) resources that look like web pages and hyperlinks “on top” of private group chats.

We can spitball this for a second: in the current public web, the hyperlinks between resources are HTTP URLs relative to “site addresses”—domain names—which are global and public. The economic system described by Bruce Schneier above exists because it is possible for the owner of a domain name to sell the eyeballs of future visitors to an advertiser today, without any oversight from the current and future visitors. What if that transaction was made impossible? What if the hyperlinks were relative to private group spaces instead, and data (“site”) navigation between private groups would require explicit approval from members on both sides? What if publishing new versions of a page was subject to local community guidelines? For example, policies that block certain types of advertisement or selling eyeballs to non-local entities?

The Internet has been like that before. It could become like that again. One can dream.

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Let us talk about business next. In this Instagram Reel which I will keep nameless, a popular author reveals that they derive a large advertisement-based income, in cahoots with Facebook, from plagiarism of someone else’s creative work. The original author gets nothing. That revelatory video, ironically, also becomes popular and generates even more advertisement income. Intellectual rights are trampled in impunity, and generative AI is not even involved.

What do we learn from this? One can choose to be offended, although I would point out that the author is allegedly a teenager and thus possibly not fully ethically mature yet. One could also argue that the original creator accepted this risk when they chose to publish on Reddit without a restrictive (re)distribution license for their work.

My take on this is thus: there is apparently unsatisfied demand for text delivery using engaging combinations of audio and video. People do not like written text anymore (visual only), and they do not really like audiobooks either (audio only). They want input that is both audio and video. There is actually research in this direction already: Young People prefer TV subtitles (BBC). Anecdotally, this is how I consume all my YouTube videos nowadays. The cynical take is that the youngsters cannot read any more or have the attention span of a goldfish, and only simultaneous visual and auditory input can reach their brain. My take, based partly on personal experience, is that it simply works better: better learning with less effort. As long as this fact is not yet commonly accepted, this particular teenager (and Facebook) will continue to be able to extract income from this niche.

In my ideal future, authors would produce content in the way that they are most productive at (usually, in writing, which is distinctly better for production) and readers would consume content in the way that works best for them, and the translation between the two would be fully automated and commoditized—making no one more rich in the process than the author. One can dream.

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In Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret: Founder Liquidity, Stefan Theard tells us about the myth that company founders “deserve” more shares of their business because they “take more risk”. Closer to the truth, tech founders transfer a lot of cash from their company funds to their private pockets, with support from their investors, to ensure that they do not operate their business under the influence of financial anxiety. Company founders do not, in fact, take much risk (when venture capital is involved). The real question, then, becomes why regular employees compensated using equity cannot also transfer some of that cash into their pockets too. As Stefan explains, it’s usually because they don’t know it’s an option or this option is hidden from them. If more people knew this was an option, they would demand to use that service as a matter of course, which would create competitive pressure across companies to offer this service in exchange for talent. So really, we should talk about it.

Such is the power of collective bargaining. One can dream.

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Moving on to this month’s dose of gen AI skepticism.

There’s a person whom I believe is called Nikhil Suresh, writing under the pseudonym Ludic, who posts boisterous, comical and inflammatory commentary on the tech industry over at mataroa.blog. In the past, they made their name known for pieces with evocative titles such as Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug (a critique positing that most of corporate “leadership” is illegitimate) or Most Tech Jobs Are Jokes And I Am Not Laughing (a critique positing that the industry is rife with rent-extracting middlemen sitting between customers and tech talent). This month, something happened: they posted I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again, and “the internet” erupted with indignation. Apparently, this struck a chord. I laughed, but the author reports that sadly other readers did not laugh as much and instead harassed them. My take: folk do not like feeling stupid, and they like even less when others point out they are stupid and laugh.

It’s not just some guy named Ludic. Allegedly, Rodney Brooks also thinks it’s a hype. And increasingly, serious investor money goes towards Sober AI (quoth Doug Breunig). In Umar Nasir’s view, we are near the top of the sigmoid curve. I just hope to spot the next slope not too far behind everyone else.

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References:

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Raphael Poss Avatar Raphael Poss is an entrepreneur who occasionally publishes field notes on systems, leadership, and the messy edge between technology and people.
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