Did the Suits win the Internet?
arnoldkling.com
arnoldkling.com
One day the team was invited to lunch, where we were informed that our efforts were appreciated but it was time for the adults to take over. Marketing was stepping in to manage everything properly.
Our consolation prize? A motivational screen saver. I long thought that, if they had at least been clueful enough to give us Doom or something on those CDs, maybe the team wouldn’t have felt quite so humiliated.
The senseless consumption machine assimilates everyone.
Until iPhone 86 and Star Wars 123 can't get made cause there are no resources left, Geeks and Suit will continue to serve the machine.
I am able to spend so little because I live in a very central area of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. My apartment is a spacious 80$ / month concrete box, around 5m x 16m with tall ceilings, natural ventilation, and a balcony facing out into a long alley. Around 100m away is one of the largest markets in the city, and so there is tons and tons of cheap, healthy food in walking distance (e.g. a kilo of mangoes for 0.25$ when in season). The really notable aspect of living here is the sheer population density -- I've estimated that in a 100m radius around me, in dense rows of five story apartments [1], there are probably over 5000 people living together relatively harmoniously. Being somewhat of a shut-in, this is really great for me as every day I see and chat with many neighbors, local vendors, and other familiar faces. I also live within walking distance of the absolutely awesome Olympic Stadium [2] and go there most days to sprint and lift weights with the Cambodian national track team (choosing cheap or free hobbies is pretty key to this lifestyle I suppose). Most everything else that I love doing involves computers, so other than a few laptops, speakers, a guitar, a nice table and chair, a mattress on the floor, etc. I don't really own much.
That's not to say there are not difficult moments here. Even though I personally am not struggling financially, it's hard to totally escape the effects of poverty when you are immersed in it. A few years back, for example, a teenage boy killed himself in this neighborhood by jumping from a 5th story balcony, and knowing the backstory I don't think he would have done it if he had the money to escape from his home life. Seeing other people struggle is tough, but of course not nearly as tough as being in that situation yourself.
[1] http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/... (a view looking out from the balcony of my first apartment here)
[2] http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/... (this is from 4 years ago, days after I arrived, now there is a new field and track!)
So while I am extremely sympathetic to and cognizant of how hard many Khmer people work for their living, most of what I see day to day is happy families and people laughing and doing things that are just very normal, for lack of a better word. It's something that I always want to remain aware of, but at the same time it's not what I want to be focused on all the time when I am meeting people.
I hope that makes sense. To put it another way, I can't identify with their struggle but regarding happiness, I feel that once our basic needs are met that we're all pretty much the same. I guess that's why I don't feel an emotional distance between myself and the people I meet here, most of the time. I also feel really, really compelled to use the skills that I have to make some money in a reasonably ethical way and more or less give it away to the many friends and acquaintances I have here.
Sorry for such personal questions. I just returned to India from the US and at some level, I feel I'm trying to live a US lifestyle in India.
I definitely don't think that because I've superficially lived in the same location for 4 years that somehow my experience is now anything like that of my neighbors, but I do believe now more than ever that despite our totally disparate backgrounds, there is still so much commonality between people all over the world. And of course like anywhere people come in all types, ranging from charming, funny, rude, shy, nerdy, mentally ill, etc. and everything in between.
Where in India can I ask? I visited India almost ten years ago now, and I have good memories of Rajasthan, Delhi (except for the crazy pollution!), Mumbai, and especially some smaller cities in Dehradun. The level of poverty in India seemed much more dire than in Cambodia, though I don't know if that's borne out statistically or not -- just my impression. Still, I would love to go back and now I suppose the flight would not be nearly so long.
Poverty is still an issue and it may well be worse than Cambodia. The (dis)advantage India has is that economic growth happens organically here. In the 3 weeks I've been back, women entrepreneurs have given me pamphlets for their at-home beauty treatment visits to hand over to my mother. If this were more organized, some VC somewhere would have converted this into a chain of stylists making home visits.
Anyway, thanks for the conversation. My personal goal is to see people/myself as they are.
Fast forward almost 20 years and I make a really nice living off of an Internet-enabled business but I still long for my geek beginnings and strive to keep it alive however I can. In my spare time, I run a couple of forums in the automotive industry. One of my forums is the oldest and most popular forum [1] for its particular marquee but unlike virtually all of its competitors, my forum does not run any advertising, nor does it accept donations. It's completely free. A throw-back to the days when geeks built cool shit because it was fun and there was respect for people who built cool shit for the sake of building it.
Serve the machine, or control the machine?
If Star Wars Episode 123 was released straight to DVD with no advertising, no cover-art, no previews, no tie-in toys... would the demand exist?
Has "the architecture of the web" really changed away from "peer to peer" towards - what - centralized or top-down? In what respect?
Is the existence of Netflix and Facebook a threat to 1990s style Geekdom? Don't these modes of approach exist side-by-side?
"the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment"
Setting "mass entertainment" aside for a moment, it seems to me there are larger industries catering to other needs than the 90s ever dreamed: scientific inquiry, literacy, accessibility, communication, environmental protection, disaster awareness and relief, poverty alleviation, among others have all risen because of the internet. Those, and mass entertainment too, have all been driven by the interests and focus of Geeks, as I see it.
Am I wrong? Did I misunderstand something?
Facebook's existence isn't preventing other social networks from taking off, human nature is. Go start your own social network, I guarantee the Facebook police will not kick in your door and shut you down.
Seriously though the changes being proposed and enacted in the regulatory environment around social networks mean that there is a danger the real police will kick down your door if you run a moderately successful social network.
We wanted anyone to be be able to be a first-class citizen of the Net. But we ended up beholden to our Monopoly ISPs. TCP/IP only gives first-class status to ISPs, not to us. BGP doesn't scale if we all tried to have our own first-class routers.
Yes, things are getting better in all sorts of industries; a similar boom occurred with the wide-scale deployment of the 19th century Railroads. But things got better still with the deployment of automobile roads.
I propose we do the same with a globally scalable mesh network.
AFAIK though, DARPA wanted a design that could survive nuclear war due to its' distributed nature. Has the Internet and in particular TCP/IP, been successful in that regard? It would appear not.
The original "geek" hobbies are mainstream now.
Then again, I always found geeks vs suits immature and hypocritical. Suits are stupid cause they judge people by cloth, but we won't hire someone who listened parents advice and came in suit not knowing it is uncool. Totally.
But you do need large amounts of capital to move packets all around the globe like magic, so naturally the suits won the Internet.
While it was cheap to get into the game at an individual level (a PC, Notepad, and a couple of O'Reilly books sufficed), the costs to stand up a professional, scalable operation with the necessary tools and talent took meaningful CAP/OPEX investment. (Which is why we also were able to institute the less-laudable norm of blowing massive stacks of cash on meaningless toys and parties -- they were a relatively minor line item next to everything else.)
So, yeah, the suits were running stuff from the beginning -- they may have been government, military, academia, or corporate, but someone had to front that cash. While I certainly buy into the belief that platform monopolies and morally-murky business models are of grave concern, I love the fact that a kid can stand up a SaaS business in a weekend on a DO droplet and never have to beg for a seed investment.
Now it's up to us hackers to use decentralized algorithms and encryption to take it back. Thankfully, these are fairly understood nowadays.
And when we write this code, ensure it's got a healthy amount of copyleft built-in because multi-national software companies that live off of proprietary are afraid that this will eat their lunch the way Linux and GNU did.
A second (or third) ISP isn't going to suddenly show up at my house because it doesn't make economic sense. In the same way that two railroad lines don't get built between the same two cities.
A real scalable mesh protocol could change the economic calculation.
Like you say, these are now understood and solved problems, it is just a matter of using them and building apps that are more sticky than centralized apps. Unfortunately, us p2p-crypto people kinda suck at making "sticky" apps, so I feel like our greatest hurdle is roping design/product people in. That will be the killer challenge to get mass adoption of p2p crypto based apps, the psychology, not the technology.
a) Much of the reason we have strong encryption is because big, bad companies like Apple have pushed so heavily for it.
b) In what way has Microsoft and Apple had their "lunch eaten" by Linux ? And on the server side it was arguably the failure of IBM, Sun, Oracle etc to recognise the shift to commoditised hardware and price accordingly that cost them market share.
> If users owned their own social media, they could set terms of service in which they keep control over personal data.
I would like to mention it is not about the individual but collective/cooperative ownership of internet platforms. For example, https://social.coop
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix etc. They never existed a few decades ago and are far more influential than companies like Comcast, NBC, Fox etc.
So yes capitalism continues to be the dominant model. But it's not always the same companies in control.
Symbolic revolution is the glaring fear of post-capitalist theory, and the past couple decades glorifying Silicon Valley's sneakers-at-the-office antics falls right in line.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk etc etc. These people and so many others have had significant impacts on the internet we see today and now they are just "suits" ? And why do we need to group people like this ? Many technical people have been responsible for negative elements of the internet which the "suits" fought against. And vice versa.
Does anyone have a link to a plain text version of this article?
Alan Kay says,
"...this was just like two years before going to PARC. I finished my PhD. I started thinking about this. I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.”
Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds.
…how successful is the iPhone? It’s about as successful as you can get, so that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of television in our time.
Around 1995, the Suits discovered the World Wide Web. Their reaction: this is going to be television on steroids! Media giants will rule the earth, as the Internet becomes a vehicle for mass entertainment. At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business. Instead, personal computers, with access to the Net, were putting the means of production in the hands of the individual. Government would be powerless to control or censor the Net. As of now, doesn’t it seem like the Suits were right? Maybe they thought that some of the old media powerhouses would do better than they have done, and maybe they didn’t foresee upstarts like Facebook. But the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment than those of us on the Geek side would have expected.
When I've talked about this before, some people have asked "what javascript vulnerabilities?" I've answered that question here: [1] More details about how I browse the web here: [2]
It is reassuring to know that I am not the only one attempting to avoid as much as possible the "paradigm shift" of Web 2.0/3.0, thanks for the note.