Mainframes were followed by PCs, and then the web, and then smartphones. Each of these new models started out looking limited and insignificant, but each of them unlocked a new market that was so much bigger that it pulled in all of the investment, innovation and company creation and so grew to overtake the old one. Meanwhile, the old models didn’t go away, and neither, mostly, did the companies that had been created by them. Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.

Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.

This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive.

These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible.

Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.

there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares.

LinkedIn tried to take the flat, dumb address book and turn it into both structured flow and a network of sorts. But by doing that for everyone, it has the same problem as a spreadsheet, file share or email - it’s a flat, lowest-common-denominator canvas that doesn’t capture the flows that many particular professions or tasks need.

There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning.

every application category is getting rebuilt as a SaaS web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there’s almost no native PC application that can’t be rebuilt on the web. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time

an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring ‘roughnecks’ in a mobile app would have sounded absurd - now it sounds absurd if you’re not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.

I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone. Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.

It seems distant now, but once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV. Since the late fifties, TV has had a special role, both as the country’s dominant medium, in audience and influence, and as a bête noire for a certain strain of American intellectuals, who view it as the root of all evil. In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” from 1985, Neil Postman argues that, for its first hundred and fifty years, the U.S. was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium—in the form of pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons—structured not only public discourse but also modes of thought and the institutions of democracy itself. According to Postman, TV destroyed all that, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was, in a very literal sense, meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

The internet is a firehose. I don’t, myself, have 351 thousand unread emails, but when anyone can publish and connecting and sharing is free and frictionless, then there is always far more than we can possibly read. So how do we engage with that?

So your feed becomes a sample - an informed guess of the posts you might like most. This has always been a paradox of Facebook product - half the engineers work on adding stuff to your feed and the other half on taking stuff out. Snap proposed a different model - that if everything disappears after 24 hours then there’s less pressure to be great but also less pressure to read everything. You can let go. Tiktok takes this a step further - the feed is infinite, and there’s no pressure to get to the end, but also no signal to stop swiping. You replace pressure with addiction.

Another approach is to try to move the messages. Slack took emails from robots (support tickets, Salesforce updates) and moved them into channels, but now you have 50 channels full of unread messages instead of one inbox full of unread messages.

Screenshots are the PDFs of the smartphone. You pull something into physical space, sever all its links and metadata, and own it yourself.

Email newsletters look a little like this as well. I think a big part of the reason that people seem readier to pay for a blog post by email than a blog post on a web page is that somehow an email feels like a tangible, almost physical object - it might be part of that vast compost heap of unread emails, but at least it’s something that you have, and can come back to. This is also part of the resurgence of vinyl, and even audio cassettes.

The film-camera industry peaked at 80bn consumer photos a year, but today that number is well into the trillions, as I wrote here. That’s probably why people keep making camera apps with built-in constraints, but it also prompts a comparison with this summer’s NFT frenzy. Can digital objects have value, and can a signature add scarcity to a JPEG - can it make it individual?

there are now close to 5bn people with a smartphone, and all of us are online and saying and doing things, and you will never be able to read everything ever again. There’s an old line that Erasmus, in the 15th century, was the last person to have read everything - every book that there was - which might not have been literally possible but which was at least conceivable. Yahoo tried to read everything too - it tried to build a manually curated index of the entire internet that reached 3.2m sites before the absurdity of the project became overwhelming. This was Borges’s 1:1 scale map made real. So, we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and Futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.