Saved

If you’d looked at Skype in 2004 and argued that it would own ‘voice’ on ‘computers’, that would not have been the right mental model. I think this is where we’ll go with video - there will continue to be hard engineering, but video itself will be a commodity and the question will be how you wrap it. There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon’s building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well. There’s lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be ‘video’ and then it will disappear inside.

the calendar is often the aggregation layer - you don’t need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone’s contact list - effectively, it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation - it has no graph of its own.

one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a ‘room’, where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on ‘people’, where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it’s a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) - Apple’s FaceTime is only people (no URLs).

When Snap launched, there were already infinite ways to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are you sending a picture? What is the underlying social purpose?’ You’re not really sending someone a sheet of pixels - you’re communicating.

That’s the question Zoom and all its competitors haven’t really asked. Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but it hasn’t asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is that the purpose of this moment? What is the ‘mute’ button for - background noise, or so I can talk to someone else, or is it so I can turn it off to raise my hand? What social purpose is ‘mute’ actually serving? What is screen-sharing for? What other questions could one ask? And so if Zoom is the Dropbox or Skype of video, we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo.

Meanwhile, whenever I talk to music people or book people, very quickly the conversation becomes a music industry conversation or a book industry conversation. What matters for music are artists and touring and labels and so on, and what matters for books are writers and publishers and rights and Amazon’s bargaining power in books and so on. These aren’t tech conversations.

Tech needed content to make their devices viable, but having got the content (by any means necessary), and with it of course completely resetting the dynamics of the industry, tech outgrew music and books and moved on to bigger opportunities.

All of this of course takes us to TV, the industry that’s next on the tech industry’s content journey. Just as new technology unlocked massive change in music and (rather less so) in books, it is now about to break apart the bundled, linear channel model of the TV industry (this is especially the case in the USA, which has a hugely over-served pay TV market). As this happens, there are all sorts of questions that follow on: what happens to channels that might be able to make more going direct to consumer (HBO, perhaps); what happens to channels that might benefit from being in a bundle and lose from having to go direct (ESPN, perhaps), where the syndication model goes, and so on, and so on.

Just as for music or books, though, these are all fundamentally TV industry questions. What viewing distribution, what rights structure, what exploitation chain, what relationship between creatives, financiers, aggregators and distributors - these are all southern California questions, not northern California questions. So, what are the northern California questions, and will this end up being any more strategic than books or music?

Amazon and Netflix have entered TV content creation and ownership in ways and on a scale that no-one from tech ever did for music or books. Amazon did try to get into book publishing and has a significant self-publishing arm, but it had little success recruiting existing mainstream authors; neither Apple nor Spotify created a record label.

Netflix, of course, is a TV company, in the context of this conversation - it isn’t using content for leverage for some other platform (Spotify is the same, without the commissioning). But Amazon clearly is using content for platform leverage - as something else to speed up the Prime flywheel. Prime has become a third pillar to Amazon’s business, next to logistics and the ecommerce platform, and Amazon is always looking for ways to add more perceived value to it, preferably with no marginal cost - TV content that it owns outright is exactly that.

You don't close your Facebook account - you just go there less. You might stop paying for the Youtube TV service, but that won’t cut off your access to any other part of Google - nor would anyone want it to - the purpose of these businesses is reach. Nor, really, will you fundamentally change your search behaviour if Google discovers the next Game of Thrones. That is, cancel Prime and you'd lose Amazon, but what do Google & FB have to cancel? Without some platform decision to lock you into, content is marketing, and revenue, but not a lever.

Apple has always preferred a very asset-light approach to things that are outside its core skills. It didn’t create a record label, or an MVNO, and it didn’t create a credit card for Apple Pay - it works with partners on the existing rails as much as possible (even the upcoming Apple Pay P2P service uses a partner bank).

Part of ‘content is king’ was the idea that (at least in theory) content companies can withhold access to their libraries entirely, and in the past one might have presumed that that meant they had the power to kill any new service at birth. In reality, rights-holders have always had too strong a need for short-term revenue to forgo broad distribution, and few of them individually had a strong enough brand to extract a fee that was high enough to justify exclusivity. They always have to take the cheques - individually to meet their bonus targets, and collectively to meet their earnings estimates.

This is a multi-sided market place with too many players on both sides for anyone to exert dominance: Apple dominated purchased music and Amazon dominates ebooks (thanks to the DoJ), but there is no such dominance on the buy or sell side for TV, for now.

The reason Apple TV, Chromecast, FireTV and everything else feel so anti-climactic is that getting onto the TV was a red herring - the device is the phone and the network is the internet. The smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits it. Internet advertising will be bigger than TV advertising this year, and Apple’s revenue is larger than the entire global pay TV industry. This is also why tech companies are even thinking about commissioning their own premium shows today - they are now so big that the budgets involved in buying or creating TV look a lot less daunting than they once did.

Given all that, here’s what made me gasp on day 1 and what I’m still thinking about. Peeping through passthrough. The way it works is that you “draw” (in VR) a box on the floor. Within that box, you are immersed in 3D virtual reality. Near the edge, you see the box around you outlined as a grid. As you touch the edge, a hole appears… you can poke your head through, and you see the real world beyond, in black and white fuzzy passthrough. I found myself leaning out to have a chat or to grab a drink. Delightful. A Godzilla’s eye’s view. Playing mini golf, I found a button that let me zoom out. Suddenly I was standing in the middle of this golf course arranged on a mountain, the mountain halfway up my chest. Walking just a foot or two, and bending down, and leaning close, I could examine bridges and trees and caves and courses. An incredible, examinable overview, in a way that would take multiple steps on any other device. Height, space, and scale. In the first room of Anne Frank’s house, there’s a steep staircase leading down, but it’s inaccessible from the tour. However I was able to kneel down, put my head through the bannisters, and peer over the edge, down the stairwell, and into the next room. I know this is what VR is all about, but the sense of being located continues to astound. What do we do now the gamut of interaction can include vertigo and awe? It’s like suddenly being given an extra colour. Objects that cross the threshold. When I pick up the real-life controls, they appear in VR space. Headset on, everything black and gone – except the controls in my hands are still there. And now they have extra green lights and details on them! Janus objects that face both ways into physical and fictive reality. The controls are real… but realer in VR. So many opportunities for play.

Many national governments around the world are showing themselves to be inefficient and slow-moving in response to long-running problems and rapid changes in people's underlying needs.

Now consider local governments. Cities and states, as we've seen from the examples at the start of this post, are at least in theory capable of genuine dynamism. There are large and very real differences of culture between cities, so it's easier to find a single city where there is public interest in adopting any particular radical idea than it is to convince an entire country to accept it. There are very real challenges and opportunities in local public goods, urban planning, transportation and many other sectors in the governance of cities that could be addressed. Cities have tightly cohesive internal economies where things like widespread cryptocurrency adoption could realistically independently happen. Furthermore, it's less likely that experiments within cities will lead to terrible outcomes both because cities are regulated by higher-level governments and because cities have an easier escape valve: people who are unhappy with what's going on can more easily exit.

I would argue that there are two distinct categories of blockchain ideas that make sense: Using blockchains to create more trusted, transparent and verifiable versions of existing processes. Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance.

One simple idea that plenty of people, including government officials around the world, have brought up to me on many occasions is the idea of governments creating a whitelisted internal-use-only stablecoin for tracking internal government payments. Every tax payment from an individual or organization could be tied to a publicly visible on-chain record minting that number of coins (if we want individual tax payment quantities to be private, there are zero-knowledge ways to make only the total public but still convince everyone that it was computed correctly). Transfers between departments could be done "in the clear", and the coins would be redeemed only by individual contractors or employees claiming their payments and salaries.

Many more processes could be made more trustworthy with blockchains: Fair random number generators (eg. for lotteries) - VDFs, such as the one Ethereum is expected to include, could serve as a fair random number generator that could be used to make government-run lotteries more trustworthy. Fair randomness could also be used for many other use cases, such as sortition as a form of government. Certificates, for example cryptographic proofs that some particular individual is a resident of the city, could be done on-chain for added verifiability and security (eg. if such certificates are issued on-chain, it would become obvious if a large number of false certificates are issued). This can be used by all kinds of local-government-issued certificates. Asset registries, for land and other assets, as well as more complicated forms of property ownership such as development rights. Due to the need for courts to be able to make assignments in exceptional situations, these registries will likely never be fully decentralized bearer instruments in the same way that cryptocurrencies are, but putting records on-chain can still make it easier to see what happened in what order in a dispute.

There is an inevitable political tension between a home as a place to live and a home as an investment asset, and the pressure to satisfy communities who care about the latter often ends up severely harming the affordability of the former. A resident in a city either owns a home, making them massively over-exposed to land prices and introducing perverse incentives to fight against construction of new homes, or they rent a home, making them negatively exposed to the real estate market and thus putting them economically at odds with the goal of making a city a nice place to live.

What if we could create a divisible and fungible city token, that residents could hold as many units of as they can afford or feel comfortable with, and whose value goes up as the city prospers?

Create economic alignment between residents and the city. This means first of all that the coin itself should clearly become more valuable as the city becomes more attractive. But it also means that the economics should actively encourage residents to hold the coin more than faraway hedge funds. Promote saving and wealth-building. Home ownership does this: as home owners make mortgage payments, they build up their net worth by default. City tokens could do this too, making it attractive to accumulate coins over time, and even gamifying the experience. Encourage more pro-social activity, such as positive actions that help the city and more sustainable use of resources. Be egalitarian. Don't unduly favor wealthy people over poor people (as badly designed economic mechanisms often do accidentally). A token's divisibility, avoiding a sharp binary divide between haves and have-nots, does a lot already, but we can go further, eg. by allocating a large portion of new issuance to residents as a UBI.

And 21st-century digital democracy through real-time online quadratic voting and funding could plausibly do a much better job than 20th-century democracy, which seems in practice to have been largely characterized by rigid building codes and obstruction at planning and permitting hearings.

The main trap that governments should avoid is too quickly sacrificing optionality. An existing city could fall into this trap by launching a bad city token instead of taking things more slowly and launching a good one. A new city could fall into this trap by selling off too much land, sacrificing the entire upside to a small group of early adopters. Starting with self-contained experiments, and taking things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible, is ideal.

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

Generalists can pursue broader themes, questions, and lenses which, across their interests give them a deep perspective from breadth.For example, a specialist is someone who is obsessed with chess and spends their waking hours practicing, playing, and studying.A generalist is someone who is obsessed with the idea of game-play, and has researched and gone deep on sports, childhood psychology, board games, and philosophy.

Embracing being a coordinate on the map for a point in time is about allowing yourself to be seen as something specific. Generalists can feel trapped by that but the truth is being specific, and being on the map for others is a way of being in service. If you never pin yourself down (just for a time) you miss the benefits of being connected or in service.