I understand that commodification is inevitable (and yes anime is already a soulless business), but goddamn if it doesn't look like some form of neurosis. It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
>It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.
He writes from the perspective of, "How are we having so many shortages during this global pandemic? We used to BUILD things, goddammit!" And now, fewer than 5 years later, a16z says:
> Yet, we believe that anime is just getting started – today, new technologies and business models are accelerating a once niche industry to even greater heights.
To the extent that anyone in power in tech claims to believe in the greater good, they are full of shit, a16z very much included. It's fun for CEOs and VCs to make grand proclamations about what's wrong in the world. But at the end of the day, they only care about making money.
Or maybe anime is one of those "new industries" Marc Andreessen said he was so excited about?
As for a16z, andreeson's 30k word moronic Randian rant speaks for itself. People obsessed with optimization should not be involved in public policy.
I mean, they should. It would be cool if we could optimize public policy. Optimize means make as effective as possible, right? They should just not be so laser-focused on one metric that they're blind to the side effects created by optimizing for it.
A counterpoint, though, just for fun. Optimizing for one thing usually means tradeoffs in another. Optimize for space, lose out on time. Optimize for efficiency, lose out on resiliency. Time spent optimizing one metric means time lost for working on others, that kind of thing.
There are a lot of qualities you want from those who work on policy, but "hyperfocusing on pet policies and specific metrics" ain't one of them.
If you make a good one you could always port it and sell it later (Celeste), but that's kinda beside the point.
For a second imagine what environment they went through, what battles they had to fight for decades and keep being on top. You can't be a normal balanced person with good friendly personality and achieve any of that. Even if you start at absolutely stellar lucky place, you will end up as say Stallman (respect to that guy, but you can see life path vs Jobs difference mainly due to character).
The fact that such people are celebrated and imitated and there is a lot of strive to replicate their success path is normal. Why - as per J. Peterson (topic on its own, but his psychological stuff I still respect) there is cca 1:20 sociopaths and 1:100 psychopaths in general population. Do the numbers, they are not nice but then you can understand whats happening in this world and politics much better. HN isn't representative of general population, that ratio is much worse although smart folks like that know when to be quiet and just watch/read.
I am not trying to scorn those folks, at their best they do move whole society further, and we desperately need that now. But they are overall not good people, sort of necessary evil IMHO.
It might be a natural consequence of reaching those positions. While their rise often comes with harsh decision-making and the development of certain traits, it's not just luck or randomness. Gates, Jobs, and others possess(ed) unique talents and vision that propelled them forward. Their abilities, whether in technology, leadership, or understanding markets, are rare, and that's a critical part of the equation. Of course, such talent, combined with navigating cutthroat environments, shapes the person in ways that we don't like. Let’s not forget politicians in this discussion, as they add layers to the same dynamic. It may simply be the way things work, at least until we shift (or not) toward something else.
Beyond the ethical and moral debate, someone has to do the work. For example, during the antitrust case against Microsoft, Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems' CEO, was one of Microsoft’s most vocal critics. At that time, I couldn’t help but wonder: would McNealy play the same game if he had the chance? Interestingly, this was also a period when Sun and IBM were reportedly bribing politicians in other parts of the world to stay competitive in the very game they criticized.
It's like The Scorpion and the Frog fable: entities in power often act according to their nature. Microsoft's dominance might have been inevitable, and even McNealy, in a similar position, could have behaved the same. The question is whether this is just the nature of competition at the top, or if there's another way forward.
You ever notice how their visions for the future of humanity make THEM ever more powerful and wealthy, and when it comes to discussing the harm their plans do to other people, it's "well, you can't make an omelete, you know..."
I'd also argue we decidedly DON'T need that right now. We are at the start of a genuine climate catastrophe, and these titans of business, these movers of society, in response, they're... Investing at a record pace in technologies that require re-commissioning old power plants to supply them. Brilliant. I'm so glad our future is in their capable hands. /s
>It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
At least for old growth forests you could argue that it's mispriced because it's providing biodiversity/carbon sequestration which can't be sold on the market. Meanwhile the benefits provided by anime accrue solely to its consumers. What's the problem with getting them to pay for it?
This is too generous, particularly with regards to a16z coming into an already existing market. In reality, it's more akin to taking something that already exists in a form that people enjoy and are already willing to pay for, and both bastardizing and cannibalizing it into something of lesser quality just so that you can have additional excuses to charge more money for things that you never used to charge money for before.
"Nice thing you have there, be a shame if we fucked it up so that we could make more money off of it," is a mental illness.
This is definitely not accurate: a functioning market drives profits toward zero. Therefore "extract profit" is always synonymous with "break the market" i.e. monopolize through regulatory capture, trade secrets, network effects, proprietary protocols, or whatever else.
To quote Mr Thiel [to a venture capitalist, at least] "monopoly is the condition of every successful business".
Fwiw it might be fair to say extracting revenue means providing something people are willing to pay for. Not profit though.