Sequoia Productive Capital
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
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.
> all i see today are walls instead of bridges.
Whenever I read these comments I wonder if people are using a different Internet than I am, because this isn't my experience at all.
I can access whatever I want, discuss whatever I want, and interact with whoever I want online. We have a multitude of platforms to choose from and I don't even have to pay for most of them. Honestly I don't even look at ads because I downloaded a free ad-blocker plugin for my free web browser and it all just works.
Even my social media is nothing like the dystopian claims I see online. I don't use Facebook much, but 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.
I suspect these dystopian viewpoints come less from real-world experience and more from bouncing ideas around in echo chambers. It seems the people who are most opinionated about what social media is or isn't are those with the least direct experience in the matter, instead substituting hyper-dramatized accounts from news stories, HN comments, and agenda-pushing documentaries like "The Social Dilemma". There's a certain sense of elitism involved wherein the anti-social-media and anti-silicon-valley people feel that they are the only ones who see through the facade and understand what's really going on.
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...
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?)
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.
> 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.