jasdi

The US had decades of low interest rates, dollar hegemony and no large power challenger. So its easy to get away with lot of excess. Until you can't.

Just have to read some history. A great example is the Gilded Age and what followed after the peak.

Why didn't the grand masters like Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan control where the story went? How did the system prop up an Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair or Teddy Roosevelt? Similarly when interesting characters like that don't emerge eg China or Russia the story goes in very different directions for the people who run Companies. Companies and what they are upto can look very mesmerizing but they really aren't. The British East India Company had more resources and land than the British Govt yet where are they today?

Firms (or any large grouping) and what ever they believe, are a part of much larger systems. They are not The System but part of the Ecosystem.

People inside and outside the firm forget that all the time. History is full of examples of what happens after that. Another great example is why did Central Banks emerge all around the world? What do you think was happening before when the power to issue Currency was in the hands of individual Banks or Kings?

If AI does replace jobs massively we will get UBI type systems just like we got Central Banks whose goal is Ecosystem Stability.

In the past people were told they had Free Speech, but they didn't have Free access to Broadcast Media (newspapers/radio/tv/movie studios/satellites). It was always up to someone else with Access to Broadcast(one to all messaging) to prop up voices they thought was important.

Shannon's Information theory tells us Social Media as a system can't work cause - once you tell people their voice matters, give everyone in the room a mic, plugged into the same sound system, and allow everyone to speak, firstly you get massive noise, secondly as a reaction people will scream louder and louder and repeat their message more and more. Noise only compounds. The math says it can't work. The way people are debating about this is under an assumption that it can.

In an ideal world they should enable Flow of Value models.

If you are building data platforms, think about features that enable Flow. eg ONDC

One other thing that ChatGPT might replace is social media. Just connect people world wide who have similar interactions, interests, goals etc. People will pay for it whether the AI part gets better or not.

ChatGPT can play a major role in how groups/society gets organized.

At its essence its about how Signaling works within a population, to keep it together inspite of the vast difference between individuals.

Veblen signalling is basically - look at my leisure activities - look at all the luxury (what I eat/where I stay/what I wear etc) - look who hangs out with us - look at all the ribbons, awards, and costumes and uniforms - aren't we cool peacocks - if you want to hang out with us and have fun, better do what we tell you.

This is a very useful and effective shortcut to group/social cohesion, when there is massive and growing Info Asymmetry and Knowledge Gaps between everyone.

In the short term. It breaks down over time.

And there are good signs in the age of over info, too many signals, and too many paths to leisure and luxury, the breakdown is happening faster and faster. The environment has changed and old short cuts are less effective.

Leisure and Luxury are just tools to pull people into the same boat. New tools and signals are required to keep them there.

It's about Platformization (+ Datafication + Finacialization). When Platform Capitalism the book came out, feels like a decade ago, literally everyone agreed its Unsustainable. Its not just about how well your mindless dumbfuck platform milks the consumer and producer simultaneously. Its about all the Platforms doing it simultaneously across every single sector you look at.

Just look at GDP by sector, and ask yourself which sector hasn't been platformized?

Sooner or later the only option on the table for Govt will be to ask China how they handled Jack Ma.

But we know there are hard problems, where the group itself doesn't have a solution or agree on the same solution. Keeping groups together is a hard problem.

Whatever approach is taken, it exists inside an ever changing complex external environment that no one controls. So the approach is always reactive and adapting to the environment. One day it can look revolutionary, another day it can look mundane. Explore-Exploit tradeoff.

Gotta learn to grey rock at a group level.

That is the most effective way of making them sweat in an Attention Economy rigged in their favor.

Even more effective if you have a plan for the future that makes them react to what you are doing, instead of the other way around.

Larger the Platform the more they can squeeze the seller, the buyer, the labor, the competition, the govt (don't prevent us growing or we shall...). And of course investors too, cause they are given the Bezos spiel - don't expect profit cause we are growing.

The problem is when every company starts attempting the same thing. Its quite funny watching CEO's on conference calls these days, cause literally everyone is who is having a hard time generating profit starts producing a story about how they are going to turn into middleman. Wall Street cheers them on.

One interesting experiment going on at changing this dynamic/trap is ONDC - https://resources.ondc.org/strategypaper (worth following)

As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.

The global pool of Human Attention is non-growing but Content (real estate for Ads) keeps exploding. So the solution is simple - there has to be limits on how many Ads an ad-tech Industry can sell.

If you are allowed to sell more Ads than there are people in the land * time in a day, then its basically giving sellers permission to dupe the Ad Buyer (and indirectly the content creator who is given a false signal that its really their fault no one is paying attention when in fact the pool of available attention is finite and easy to exhaust if everyone is fishing).

Because their Engineers are constantly in situations were they have to work with much less resources. And they come up with stuff that constantly surprises people for being much cheaper. The western reaction is to then go and buy them out. Its not going to work forever. They have already taken over large swathes of the tech landscape.

Even with AI for example, Real Time inference is not required in majority of cases.

But the western engineer and corp exec in big tech, are used to buying new data centers everyday (not because of specific Customer Demand, but because of intent to capture market/snuff out competition/build moats or what ever bs an environment of over abundance has trained them to do) and then they have zillions of machines idling which they use to provide real-time inference raising the cost for everyone.

Sooner or later someone in China or India working on non real time inference will offer large corps much cheaper solutions.

The Western model is where you forget how to cook a meal at home, and end up relying on McDonalds for food, because they are everywhere, thanks to their prime directive of survival via opening new stores everyday.

But in any ecosystem where other species are growing faster than you are, its natural they will eat into your share, unless the entire ecosystem grows and creates space for everyone.

Age of Empires is a model that worked in the past when there were big difference in capabilities and information flowed much slower. Today it flows so fast, that by the time you develop capabilities to react to one thing, something new has already emerged. That doesn't mean people wont mindlessly try to control things like they did in the past. It just means they will fail, overwhelmed by the rate of change.

No Engineers were required.

These are Social problems not Engineering problems. And most Engineers would fail a high school Sociology class cause they just aren't exposed to that entire subject. For the education system to produce a Engineer+Sociologist time required would double or triple

Since Learning takes time, how society gets around it is via division of labor/specialization and multi-disciplinary teams.

So if you are in tech/engineering and want to contribute to social problems, get on multi-disciplinary teams which have experts in sociology/economic/political science/psychology/law etc cause they have already put in the time.

The US Govt represents only 4-5% of the worlds population, but the US Market controls 40-50% of the worlds global market cap value.

The difference between 1930s and today is the powers that be on all sides recognize this is abnormal.

Freedom of Speech can be given to everyone very generously, if Broadcasting (distribution) is controlled.

During the hey days of newspapers without Postal subsidies/Railway subsidies and paper mill subsidies it was very expensive for publishers to ship tons of paper across the country everyday. Even today world wide lot of Govts run the Post Office and Railways. And they subsidize rates for newspapers and magazines. Good luck getting that subsidy if you piss off the wrong people.

Same story repeats with licenses for radio/tv/satellite spectrum. Today its just Ads or control of the content factory (see who owns all the loss making news orgs in the land - Corporations). Ad supported just means who ever can bid most for the ad. And the Elites can outbid the plebs every day of the week.

Species emerge and survive where there is a unfilled niche in the environment. Bitcoin fills such niches the financial system doesn't serve. Such as black/gray markets, tax evaders, money launderers etc. All being as ancient as organized economies. When you ask why we haven't got rid of them, you start hitting deeper issues of human behavior, social and economic systems, that will take their own sweet time to deal with due to the level of complexity of the problems.

Other side to the story of why bitcoin survives is peoples reaction to loss of anonymity, bail outs of the "too big to fail" bunch etc.

Basically different groups are using the tool for their own reasons. Its pure luck they are in alignment. Which leads to more investments and innovation. If these groups find different tools to solve their problems then the story changes.

Each of these specializations (just like tech) are evolving at their own rates and are all equally capable of outpacing each other depending on the environment.

If Technical folk are not on the Boards or have controlling share in an org, or don't know how to get into such positions then they have very little to no say in how anything works.

There are countless examples were technical people object and get replaced, sidelined or fired, cuz they are totally unprepared in how to win such age old political and financial fights. If Oppenheimer, Engelbart and the Google brainiacs who protested recently got pushed aside, then its beyond obvious how the story will end for anyone else.

The lesson from history for anyone serious about this stuff is - develop business+finance acumen, or develop alliances with business+finance power.

We can only talk in terms of our Needs and why those needs are important to us. Anything else sounds like passing judgement and the reaction will be negative.